By 5:00 a.m., they had gathered four trace-finding exhibits from the grass, the pavement, the road and the church sign.
Paul decided to punish Kristen for not doing it right anyway. He put Kristen on the floor and started to have anal sex with her. Kristen defecated on him. Then she called him a bastard. Without knowing it, she had touched a nerve.
Karla was assigned cleanup duties. Once again, she found herself downstairs in front of the washing machine.
This time there was no water in the Jacuzzi. Just Kristen, naked with her hair pulled back, her head propped against the back of the tub in the peach-colored glow of the heat lamp.
“I’m going to piss on you, okay? Then I’m going to shit on you, okay?” Paul said in a whisper.
The camera was sitting on the toilet tank next to the white-tiled tub. He told the unmoving girl to close her eyes as he knelt in front of her, naked except for a long-sleeved white shirt that Housed around his waist. He took a long pull on a can of beer and set it down on the tub ledge. Faint music came from the other room.
Kristen did not move, even when he slapped her face with his semi-erect penis.
“Don’t make me mad. Don’t make me hurt you,” he said, urging her to smile while he rubbed his groin into her face.
“Don’t worry, I won’t piss in your face.”
Finally, he stood over her and urinated.
Then he moved. Turning his buttocks into her face, he squatted over her face and tried to defecate on her without success.
“You’re a fucking piece of shit. But I like you,” he told her. “You look good covered in piss.”
Kristen’s hair was a tousle of weary curls when he photographed her laying full-length in the empty tub. Her eyes were lowered, she had crossed her left hand over her right on her stomach.
While the Jacuzzi filled with water, Kristen perched at the end of the tub, one long ringlet trailing over her right breast. She nervously brushed her hair back from her face, lightly scratching her chest, her legs resting above the water jets.
Opposite her, Paul captured a reflected image in the mirror. Karla smiled, that evil half smile of hers.
It took a lot of time and hot water to fill the Jacuzzi, and the water pressure upstairs had never been as strong with the washing machine running. Kristen bathed in just a few inches of water.
“Pretend like you’re in Hollywood. Okay?” Paul said. There was no need to whisper, now that Karla had approved the scene.
Kristen gave him a disingenuous smile while bubbles billowed in the shallow water at her feet.
“Classic smile,” noted Paul.
When she gave her hair a final rinse in the tub-side faucet, Kristen bent forward and her face grew very solemn. She looked much older than her fifteen years. Her jaw set as firmly as her father’s and the mask of worry that she wore erased her youthful, feminine features.
That night Karla insisted that the three of them sleep together in the bed. With Kristen’s promise to be on her best behavior, Karla and Paul agreed not to bind Kristen.
240 STEPHEN willlams
On Saturday morning, police were vacuuming the lawn at Grace Lutheran Church, still looking for clues. They measured Kristen’s usual route to and from school. Total distance: 1.1 kilometers, or half a mile.
At the Center for Forensic Sciences, the flattened lock of hair was compared to control samples from two of Kristen’s hair brushes. It appeared to have been cut. There were no roots.
Teachers from Holy Cross Secondary volunteered to spend the day at the school, counseling and comforting concerned students.
Kristen was lying on the bed dressed in her school uniform when Paul turned on the camera and jumped on the bed beside her. It was Saturday afternoon, but Karla was still wearing her white eyelet-trimmed, spaghetti-strapped nightie.
Paul was naked except fcfr his long-sleeved white shirt. Kristen’s hair hung softly. Karla’s had been gelled into puffy bangs and sprayed into stiff” strands.
While Kristen bent to suck his nipple and hghtly rub his erect penis, Karla sat at the base of the bed nibbling on his left foot.
“I want you to guide her through this,” Paul instructed.
Karla got up to adjust the camera, checking to make sure that Paul’s head was in the shot and the focus was correct. While he leaned back into the pillow, Kristen called him “the best master” and Karla dubbed him “the king.” Paul spread his legs and Karla began fellating him, drawing Kristen to her side while he instructed them on licking protocol.
“You’re not home yet,” Paul told Kristen. He wanted to hear some “love stuff”.” Karla brought Kristen’s hand to her breast and told her that she was a “good, httle sex slave.” Kristen thanked Karla.
Then Karla took over the filming, holding the camera steady and true, framing a close-up shot of Kristen French masturbating and fellating her husband.
“Suck his dick, Kristen,” Karla told her. “Move your hand Kristen. Keep on talking.”
INVISIBLE darkness 24I
When Kristen moved her mouth away to speak to her “master,” Paul was suddenly angry.
“Don’t fucking look at me, look at my dick and talk to it,” he said, slapping her back roughly.
Karla zoomed in and out with her lens.
“Okay,” said Karla, cuing Kristen to say a line about how she hated her boyfriend and Paul was her boyfriend and he should “fuck all the girls at Holy Cross,” if it would make him happy. The bedsprings were squeaking faster and faster, when Karla interjected with the breathless information that she “got some nice mouth shots.”
Suddenly, from the basement, there was a loud whine. The dog was feeUng deprived. The sound distracted Paul but Karla urged Kristen on, calling her a “good cocksucker.”
“I want to see a mouth full of cum, Kristen,” Karla said, over the whirring motor of the camera and the baleful sound of the dog.
But Paul was not hearing the sounds he wanted to hear. Suddenly, he pounded Kristen on the back with his left hand. Kristen did not flinch. Instead, she tried to say the words. Paul hit Kristen five more times. All the while, Karla’s hand was steady on the camera.
The camera stopped and Paul took his wedding ring off and moved it to the middle fmger of his right hand next to his Masonic ring. It was a cheap wedding ring. He had only paid a couple of hundred bucks for it at D.J. Wholesale Club, and he was afraid it would bend if he had to hit Kristen again. Then it would be a real pain to try and get off.
Back at his office, Inspector Vince Bevan sat down with a report he had received from a Ministry of Transport computer programmer who had dutifully attempted to compile a list of every Camaro registered in the province of Ontario.
There were 124,970 registered vehicles, of which 36,636 were plated or unplated models within the definitive years 1978 through 1981.
“The report was voluminous,” Bevan conscientiously recorded in his report.
Officers were assigned to sort the printout by geographic area, and focus on light-colored Camaros in the Niagara Region. When Bevan finally got a chance to sleep on it, he would decide to ask for the information in ASCII, so he could sort it himself on his home computer, postal code by postal code. Inspector Bevan had resolved to locate and examine every single one of those 36,636 Camaros, car by dilapidated car, if necessary.
The fellating of Paul Bernardo left Kristen gasping for air. Once, when she raised herself to her knees to speak at his request, Karla thought she saw him holding a flashlight behind his back. In fact, he was clutching his knife in his left hand.
“All the Holy Cross girls want you,” Kristen told him.
“We’re running out of tape I think,” Karla advised.
Thirty seconds later, Paul was holding Kristen’s mouth over his penis while he ejaculated. He told her to “keep it inside.” Kristen remained motionless.
At Holy Cross, parents and school officials met behind closed doors for a crisis-intervention session. Friends and relatives congrega
ted at the home of Doug and Donna French, which was being besieged by the press.
Meanwhile, Inspector Bevan discovered that of those 36,636 plated and unplated 1978 to 1981 Camaros registered in the province, only 4,688 were owned by residents of Niagara, Hal-ton and Hamilton-Wentworth. He further brought it down to 2,084 in Niagara, 900 in Halton and 1,698 in Hamilton-Wentworth. Now that was something they could get their minds around.
In the streets, hardly anyone was out walking alone. When anyone saw a Camaro, he called it in.
INVISIBLE darkness 243
Paul pressed the video camera’s record button just as the song began. The tide track from Ice-T’s “Power” boomed over Karla, who smiled as she put the neck of an empty wine botde all the way up Kristen’s vagina. To the rhythm of Ice-T rapping, “Power, power, power,” Karla worked it in and out.
“Put it in there hard, Kar,” Paul said. Kristen smiled wanly at him. Handcuffed, with her hands behind her back, she was kneehng on another towel where her feet rested, bound by a pair of Karla’s black pantyhose. She was still dressed as a schoolgirl and her skirt was raised above her upHfted buttocks.
“Ram her hard. She called me a bastard.”
Using both of her hands, Karla forced the glass bottle in and out of Kristen French more than forty times.
Kristen winced. Winking hard, unable to move.
“You can show it hurts if it does, okay,” Paul said to Kristen. The girl tilted her head.
“It does a htde,” she said, adding the smile she knew he wanted.
Paul put the camera on the carpet and took over from Karla, pushing the bottle in hard with his right hand.
“Forgive me, please, I’m very sorry.” Kristen apologized. Paul told her to tell it to the camera. He leaned back and called Karla over to him.
“You get me hard,” he demanded. “She’s not getting me hard.” Karla sucked his nipples and his penis. When Paul moved back to Kristen, he had an erection.
“Nasty bitch,” Paul said, entering her vagina just as Ice-T was going on about “payback time.”
“Who am I?” he asked. “Who wants me?”
“Pardon me?” said Kristen, adjusting her face upward but unable to see his face. Then she started on her scripted Hnes about him being the “master,” him deserving “better,” deserving to “fuck every girl” in her school. He raised her skirt higher. PuUing out of her vagina, he then guided his penis to her anus.
Kristen screamed out in pain, a long, anguished howl. She tried to bury her face in the towel but he was still holding her hair. Painfully, she told him she was afraid she was going to
244 STEPHEN wllliams
defecate. Eight times she cried out that she was sorry, but he continued to grind himself into her buttocks.
“Fuck you,” he said, withdrawing. Then he grabbed the top of her thighs and went back to vaginal intercourse, moving in tmie to the drumbeat, crouching on the balls of his feet.
“Lick my ass, bitch,” Paul instructed Karla, and she moved in behind him.
“Touch me,” he demanded, bending over Kristen so that she could rub his nipples despite the handcuffs. “Twist right.”
Words Kristen had been told to say flowed steadily.
“You have a very beautiful wife. And you really stick together,” she noted. “All the girls at my school want to fuck you ‘cause you’re the most powerful man in the world and you’re the sexiest man in the world.”
She told him that she deserved to be punished and called him the “king of kings.” Paul tweaked his own left nipple.
“Say you want to lick all the little girls’ cunts when you get back,” Paul demanded.
Kristen did not seem to notice that he was suggesting that she would ever get to go back anywhere, but she told him what he wanted to hear. While a musical rap chorus repeated, “Say it, say it,” Paul pushed Kristen further onto her face. “Get your ass up in the air.”
Finally, he achieved his orgasm and sat back on his haunches. Kristen’s tethered hands reached out to touch his arm.
“You happy?” she asked. “That’s what matters, as long as you’re happy. You and your w^ife.”
Paul pulled back and slapped her buttocks lightly. Then he slumped against the wall near the blaring boom box. He told Karla to get him a Kleenex.
“What are you, a fucking idiot?” he grumbled when Karla handed him a few tissues. He needed the whole box. He -was busy wiping himself and the guitars were picking up Ice-T’s pace when Kristen said her last recorded words.
“I don’t know how your wife can stand being around you, ‘cause …” she started.
“Just shut up, okay,” Paul said.
INVISIBLE darkness 245
Karla’s shadow moved across Kristen’s face as she walked over to press the stop button. Kristen saw her, but said nothing. Kristen French did not have much time left.
Paul asked Kristen what she wanted for dinner and she said Swiss Chalet, so he went to Swiss and picked up two chicken dinners with extra fries. He paid with a one hundred dollar bill. At Videoflicks he returned Afigel Heart and Criminal Law and rented Shattered. He followed Bunting Road to Carlton Street to Geneva, the street Kristen lived on, to Scott, to Secord Drive, to Lake Street, to Lakeport Road, to Lock Street, to Main Street and then to the Swiss Chalet on Ann Street. He got a copy of the St. Catharines Standard. Paul was gone about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Lori Lazaruk could not believe her eyes. She was driving across the Martindale bridge out of Port Dalhousie on Saturday evening, April 18, when she passed the jerk in the gold Nissan with the video camera who had stalked her and her sister in March. He was driving back into the Port.
Quickly deciding to follow him again—this time she would make sure she found out exactly where he lived—she swung her car around. Even though she was determined, she lost him again on Bayview Drive. He just seemed to vanish in thin air.
Lori went back to her mother’s place and wrote down the license number again, a description of the car that was exactly the same as the one she had given the police the morning after she and her sister had seen him at Robin’s Donuts. There was something about this guy and his gold car and his video camera that really disturbed Lori.
When she called, she tried to convey that to the police, again, that there was something about this guy that was not right. This time Lori took down the name of the person with whom she spoke. She was a receptionist. Her name was Judy. Lori told Judy about the previous incident and supplied her current information.
246 STEPHEN wiiii.ms
She described the gold Nissan 240SX to a “T” and gave Judy the correct license number—660 HFH—and she told her that the guy must live on Bayview, because she had lost him on that street both times.
Karla’s Easter card read, “To the most wonderful man in the entire world, who means everything to me. All my love, Karly Curls.”
They drove over to Karla’s parents’ house early Sunday afternoon for the ritual Easter Sunday family dinner. As usual, Dorothy Homolka had Htde decorative gifts for her daughters and they had a family dinner together. Nothing was out of the ordinary.
On the television news that night, Doug French told an interviewer that he was convinced his daughter was still alive. “We all are. We just think she’s being held captive.”
Karel Homolka tuned in to watch “60 Minutes,” as was his custom at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday evenings. Then Dorothy watched her favorite program, “Murder She Wrote.”
Paul and Karla left shortly after 9:00 p.m. Spring was upon them. After a day of sunshine, the smell of thawing earth permeated the night air.
I ‘hi L ^-^ I-, t-‘H twenty-one
r t was a beautiful spring day. Lori D’Ascenzo saw Karla from the back window of her flower shop, which was right beside the Martindale Animal Clinic, where Karla worked. Karla was definitely a sun-worshipper. Throughout the summer she often went out behind the clinic on her breaks. That is how Lori had met her. It was
only two or three days after Kristen French had been kidnapped, and all of St. Catharines was combing the bushes, the nooks and crannies.
The Monday after the long Easter weekend was always slow, so Lori went out behind the shop to talk. Karla seemed unusually anxious and agitated. Karla said she was upset about the girls. There was that girl from Hamilton or Burlington or wherever, then the local girl who had disappeared last November— Terri Anderson—and now Kristen French. She said whoever was taking these girls seemed to have an attraction for blond hair and she was afraid she would be next. Strange, Lori thought, since Kristen had long, dark hair and all the girls Karla mentioned were in their early teens, not their twenties.
Lori and Karla had talked about this before. Karla was always asking Lori what she thought. Karla knew Lori was psychic and had empathic powers. Lori told Karla she was overreacting, she should calm down.
Inspector Vince Bevan was determined they were going to stop every Camaro in the Niagara Region … in Ontario … in Canada, if need be, until they found the Camaro in which Kristen French had been abducted. He ordered all Niagara Regional Police and any officer associated with the investigation of Kristen French’s abduction to stop and check out ever)’ Camaro they saw. They were also getting hundreds of calls a day from concerned citizens about Camaros they had seen. Soon, police officers were starting to stop the same Camaro two and three times. That phenomenon generated the inspector’s innovative sticker program. Ever)’ Camaro they stopped and checked would be given a sticker to indicate that the car had already been stopped. They used the media to get the story about the stickers out. As well, the pohce invited Camaro owners to voluntarily bring their Camaros into the Niagara Regional Police headquarters and get a sticker.
Detective Steve Irwin got a call from a Niagara Region constable on Wednesday. The constable wanted Irwin to help him conduct a “discreet” investigation into the background of a suspect named Richard Climie who had been convicted for abducting a young girl in 1984. He said it was in relation to the recent abduction of the young French girl. Detective Irwin said
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 24
