Inspector Vincent Bevan took the FBI profile at face value. He did not give it much thought, really, except that he was ambivalent about the assertion that the Mahaflfy and French homicides were unrelated. It was the placement of Kristen’s body only 546 yards from Leslie’s grave at the Halton Memorial Hill Gardens that had really got to him. He beheved that Kristen’s disposal, in that specific spot, was the deliberate act of a sick mind. There were others who shared his view. He applied for an order to exhume Leslie Mahaffy’s remains.
Kristen French had been badly beaten. Inspector Bevan wanted to determine whether or not Leslie had been similarly abused—particularly on her back. As they had determined during the French autopsy, some of the worst damage had not been visible.
Dr. McAuliffe had peeled back the layers of Kristen French’s skin and muscle like an onion. A similar examination of Leslie’s torso might tell them things they did not yet know. Since she had been in pieces and there were no superficial signs of trauma, Dr. King had not been as thorough during Leslie’s autopsy.
It took the authorities three hours to get Leshe Mahaffy’s
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casket out of the ground. They started at 7:00 a.m. The casket did not arrive at the forensic-pathology unit in Toronto until noon. The body parts were in a white body bag. There was a denim jacket, a terry-cloth robe, a handmade rag doll and a flower in the casket, which was half full of water.
A dissection of the back area revealed two small, asymmetrical circles of discoloration located on the right and left sides at chest level; nothing remotely like the extensive bruising Kristen had sustained. Nonetheless, Bevan remained resolute, in his mind, the murders were related. After the examination, they placed Leslie’s remains in a new casket. She was back in the ground by 7:00 p.m.
On their first wedding anniversary, Karla sent Paul a card: “It just gets better and better and better… . Much love from the girl who wriggled her way into your heart—me.”
The best intentions are the fastest road to hell. For the next six weeks. Inspector Bevan became a television producer and concentrated on making the most significant and extensive crime reenactment docudrama in the history of North American television.
Inspector Bevan took his creative inspiration from “reality-based” television. “The Abduction of Kristen French” was characterized by fast cuts, dramatic sound effects, fade-ins and fade-outs. The theme music was written and performed by Kristen’s brother, Darren, and there were tolling church bells to accompany the authoritative voice-over. Gelled lenses captured sympathetic images of bereaved parents, wearing their inconsolable loss like Spanish moss, backlit against giant-size posters of their dead daughters, while the opinions of expert consultants were beamed in by satellite and hypnotists served up the requisite mumbo jumbo. “The Abduction of Kristen French” had all the production values of an “A Current Affair” segment.
Inspector Bevan managed to achieve an enviable dramatic tension, inspiring equal measures of horror and sympathy,
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which generated tens of thousands of telephone calls to the hotline after the ninety-niinute opus aired at 8:00 p.m. on July 21, 1992.
The inspector gave himself and King Camaro starring roles. Wearing his trademark cowboy boots, Bevan stood stiffly beside his cream-colored, aging co-star, with the endearing, slightly rusted fender on the rear driver’s side.
“This is almost exactly hke the car that was used in the abduction of Kristen French,” he said with all seriousness and sincerity.
Watching it at home, Paul Bernardo was beside himself. Paul had told Karla how cool he had been with the two plainclothes detectives who had come to interview him, but he did not teU her exactly why or how he had managed to achieve that cool. Now she knew.
“The Abduction of Kristen French” confirmed all their suppositions, and told Paul and Karla that they would never be caught by the Green Ribbon Task Force. The task force did not have one important, salient fact right, and all their suppositions were wrong.
And now that Inspector Bevan had given the world aD the WTX)ng facts, the task force would be so busy dealing with every crackpot within a thousand miles of St. Catharines, it would never find the tvo of them. Karla was reheved. Neither of them knew exacdy why, but it was just as they both suspected—they were just meant to be. It was party time.
The program outraged the media. It revealed, for the first time, that the police considered the Mahaffy and French murders Unked, and that there were two people involved. The media had never been told about the FBI profile.
Contrarv^ to the profile Inspector Bevan had obtained from the doctors in Penetanguishene, this profile erroneously stated that one of the perpetrators was a blue-collar worker who was familiar with power tools, understood building materials and had access to a metal shop. This and much else in the program had not been previously released to the media.
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The larger media outlets in Toronto saw red. They saw “The Abduction of Kristen French” as indicative of an indefatigable arrogance on the part of Inspector Bevan. It was also an expression of the worst kind of regionally based “favoritism.”
By choosing to work exclusively with a small, independent television station in Hamilton, Ontario, Inspector Bevan had managed to aHenate all the major broadcast and print media, unnecessarily creating yet another powerful, mysterious enemy.
Bevan did not care. His bosses and other members of the immediate community were very impressed. Modern policing is an impatient bureaucracy. Activity is revered for its own sake. The pohce received literally thousands of calls to the hotline. The response was so overwhelming that the lines had to be manned for an entire week.
What Paul and Karla had imagined came true and Inspector Bevan spent every minute of his waking and working hours reviewing tips that had already been reviewed by other investigators, to make sure nothing was overlooked. Even so, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were as invisible to him as they were to the many Customs agents who routinely waved them across the border.
Somehow, Rachel Perron’s reports were overlooked. And Lori Larazuk’s. Sergeant Nesbitt’s interview with Paul Bernardo disappeared in a plethora of irrelevant data. Bubba Matille’s gut feeling might as well have stayed in his stomach. The fact that Paul Bernardo was only one of five prime suspects in the massive Scarborough rape investigation in Toronto meant nothing in the land where the Camaro was king.
Spike was an abused iguana. He was scheduled to be euthanized, when Karla rescued him and brought the lizard home. He was in bad shape. Karla brought a handful of syringes along with the reptile. Karla was adept at injecting Spike with vitamin supplements and slowly she nursed him back to health. Spike was about three feet long.
Iguanas are strange reptiles. In Tlw N{{jht of the Iguana, a play by Tennessee Williams that Karla had studied in high school,
the lizard represented the unknowable, the prehistoric, something troubling, dark and sexual.
One day toward the end of July, just after “The Abduction of Kristen French” had aired, Paul and Karla were feeling especially buoyant. Joann Fuller and Van Sniirnis had come to visit for the first time since the New Year’s incident, when Paul had punched Van repeatedly in the back of the head while Van was driving Paul and Karla home from the Pleasure Dome early that New Year’s Day, 1991. Paul had banned Van. Van was now sucking up, trying to get back into Paul’s good graces.
As usual. Buddy, the dog, was chasing Spike all over the house. This rigmarole irritated Spike, and when Joann tried to touch him, he bit her finger and drew a httle blood. Spike seemed to sense that Joann was persona non grata. However, Spike needed to learn not to bite people. As punishment, Paul and Karla took him into the guest bedroom and tried to disci-plme him.
Iguanas use their tails to defend themselves and Spike tried to thrash his tormentors. When Spike inadvertently bit Paul in the melee, Paul grabbed him, took him to th
e kitchen, put him on the chopping board and cut off his head. He did not get all the way through on the first strike, so he just kept chopping until he did. He left the severed head and the body on the chopping block. Karla threw the head out and started cleaning the body, just like that, as if they had planned to kill the iguana all along.
She skinned and gutted it, cheerfijlly explaining its innards to Joann.
“Oh,” Karla said, “Spike was a boy after all. See …” She showed Joann tiny, little gonads that looked like pearls. Karla showed Joann all the various organs, some of which she could not get out of the cavity.
Karla was most concerned about covering up the details of Spike’s ignominious end at the clinic where she worked.
“I’m not going to tell them what happened,” she announced. “I’m just going to tell them it died and we buried it outside, otherwise they’ll want me to bring it in to analyze why it died.”
Karla resolved to tell her co-workers that Spike got a cold
INVISIBLE (iarkne^s 273
ind died suddenly, and Paul was so sad that he went and buried lim. To Joann, Karla acted hke a god or something while she vas dissecting Spike. When she was done, Paul threw the car-:ass on the barbecue. Karla kept the skin.
In Central and South America and the British West Indies, ;vhere iguanas are very common, their meat is highly prized.
“It’s called bamboo chicken,” Van declared. Paul ate most of t, Karla ate some and so did Van. Joann hked Spike. She refused :o eat him.
Michelle Banks did not have high hopes. It was a Monday evening in the middle of August. Mondays in Ariantic City were usually slow. She was standing in her spot at the corner of Michigan and Pacific, when this guy pulled up in a late-model sports car and said, “Hi.”
He told her that she was pretty. He said he and his wife were newlyweds and wanted to try something different. It wasn’t often Michelle got propositioned to do it with a couple. She couldn’t even pronounce menage a trois. Michelle said there was no way she would do it unless he brought his wife back. Ten minutes later he did, but Michelle was stiU leery.
To Michelle, Paul and Karla were very clean and very well groomed. They looked like they were from a “very, very high-society family.” They seemed like a cute httle couple. She figured he was around twenty-four—he had a baby face. He was probably about 160 pounds and had blond hair—very preppy looking.
The woman could have been anywhere between twenty and twenty-four. She looked to be cut from the same mold as Far-rah Fawcett. The sides of her long blond hair came back a Htde bit, as if she had put some gel in it. The front had a very light mousse. Hers was a very conservative look, as far as Michelle was concerned.
They kept driving around and around and then coming back and trying to convince Michelle. But Michelle did not go in for any of the weird stuff. The other girls kept telling Michelle that
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she should go with them, because they were obviously not going to go with anybody else and the money would be lost.
“They don’t want nobody else,” the girls all said. “Just go, they look all right. What are you worried about?”
Finally, the girl in the car convinced her.
“Come on,” she said. “Everything will be okay.” Then Michelle and the girl started giggling about price; just making a htde fun around the process but the young man did not want to pay what Michelle was asking.
“Oh come on, go ahead, don’t be so cheap …” the girl told him just as Michelle said, “Oh well, forget it then,” and started walking away. The two approached her one more time, and it was agreed.
It was the woman who had talked her into it.
Michelle never got in the backseat of a John’s car, so instead she sat on the woman’s lap. She noticed that the car seats were not leather. It was a two-door vehicle of some kind. They went straight up Michigan to Atlantic, took a left on Atlantic, through two hghts and then a left again, back down to Pacific. The parking garage for the Trump Plaza was between Pacific and Atlantic.
Their room was the second one on the left when they got off the elevator. When they entered the room, the guy paid Michelle and she started getting undressed. Michelle told them she was pregnant. In her experience if a John went crazy and he knew the hooker had a baby inside her, he would think twice about doing physical damage. Paul and Karla told Michelle their names were Paul and Karla.
They had just come back fix>m Florida. Karla loved Mickey Mouse. They had had a good time, so they just thought they would stop off in Atlantic City, do a little gambling and have a little more ftin.
Karla was wearing a black skirt with black pantyhose and a black G-string. Michelle remembered because she never wore G-strings. Michelle thought it was a big joke. They all lay down, naked on the bed, and Michelle asked them specifically what they wanted. Paul suggested that Michelle “mess around” with Karla. Michelle knew in a few minutes that Karla knew
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exactly what she was doing and what she wanted. Michelle thought that she must be hke that—sort of a lesbian or bisexual.
Michelle made Paul put on a condom and tried to have sex with him. It was a bust. Michelle tried to start him off with oral sex while Karla rubbed his chest and kissed him. Both of the women tried to get him hard for the longest time, a couple of different ways, but it never worked. Paul was frustrated. He could not maintain an erection and every time he “deflated” the condom fell off. Karla was very sweet and understanding. She was getting her money’s worth and seemed very casual and happy to Michelle. When Paul told Karla to come and lie down next to Michelle, she would say, “okey-dokey.” To Michelle, that was submissive. Then again, Michelle was a hardened working girl. She ended the session by telling a racist joke. Then Paul got to watch her urinate, so he felt as if he had got his money’s worth. Long afterward, Michelle remembered that.
Karla had a httle strawberry birthmark on her stomach. Michelle admn*ed it. It was a beautiful mark—a beaut)’ mark. There were no other marks on Karla. Michelle thought Karla was perfect. Michelle Banks was jealous. She had no idea they had videotaped the whole thing with a hidden camera.
Inspector Sevan’s guess that the floater in Martindale Pond was Terri Anderson had been confirmed through dental records. The ubiquitous pathologist, Dr. Noel McAuliffe, had ruled out foul play, so Inspector Bevan organized a meeting with the coroner. Dr. Robert Merritt, and Terri’s father, Terry Anderson.
The Inspector explained that the coroner had concluded Terri died by drowning and that they did not feel there were any grounds for an inquest.
Toxicology tests indicated that Terri had taken LSD, which is normally untraceable twenty-four hours after ingestion because the body’s metabolic processes expel it. That suggested to the coroner that she had fallen into the water and died before her body could expel the traces of LSD.
Mr. Anderson was confused. Terri’s friends had told poHce
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that Terri had downed a few beers and done a hit of acid and was obviously stoned around 9:00 p.m. But they also said she had come around later in the evening and seemed perfectly fine. Her father had last seen his daughter shordy after midnight. He had not noticed anything unusual about her behavior.
There was no semen detected. The girl’s orifices were not distended or torn, but it was questionable whether or not those sorts of determinations could be made on a body that had been in the water for six months. And where were all her clothes? She had been wearing a leather jacket and tie-up jackboots and tight jeans. These had never been found. Where were they? And why was her T-shirt on inside out?
Inspector Bevan and the coroner were asking Mr. Anderson to accept that his daughter, who had been an excellent student, a cheerleader and a generally well-adjusted child, had, under the influence of a few beers and a hit of blotter acid, gone out and in a stupor neither he nor her friends had perceived, walked mto the fi-eezing Novemb
er waters of Lake Ontario and drowned.
There were so many questions and so few answers. But Mr. Anderson had lived for six months without knowing whether his daughter was dead or aUve. Now, after another six months, he really did not know what else to do but reluctandy agree to conclusions that gave hmi no sense of closure. Demoralized and dejected, Mr. Anderson left the meeting. Finally, Inspector Bevan had a file he could close.
Back in St. Catharines, Paul and Karla got busy. Christmas was coming and the demand for contraband had never been greater. Between October 15 and Christmas, they went back and forth across the border twenty-one times.
With her Medusa-Hke head of curly auburn hair and her blotter-acid mind, seventeen-year-old Norma Tellier became Paul and Karla’s new Jane.
Norma had been a friend of Tammv Lvn’s. Karla had com—
Paul and Karla leaving St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake,June 29, 1991. (Private collection)
f^i’t
Karla with Buddy the Rottweiler,
June 1991. (Private collection)
SCARBOROUGH RAPIST
?^/^
Scarborough Rapist poster distributed in late May
and June. 1990. (Canapress)
Homolka residence, 61 Dundonald, St. Catharines. Ontario. (Police photo)
Tanimy Lyn Honiolka,
Christmas 1989. (Private collection)
Family room in the Homolkas’ basement shortly after
paramedics removed Tammy Lyn’s body,
December 24, 1990. (Conn exhibit #47)
Leslie Erin Mahath;
age 14 years. (Canapress)
Concrete blocks containing
Leslie Mahai3'‘s body parts, on the evening
of June 29, 1991. (Court exhibit #20)
“Project Green Ribbon”
props room: “Kristen French’
mannequin dressed exactly
the way Kristen had been
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 27
