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

by Williams, Stephen, 1949-

  Karla sat stoically, stoned, under her Blossom hat. Mrs. Homolka talked too loudly, laughing, sipping her drink, saying things such as, “I hope Karla’s trial doesn’t last much longer; I’m running out of money to buy the girls’ clothes.”

  The next-door neighbor, Lynn Clarke, and Karla’s many friends, shielded her from the day of the long lenses with a large sheet of cardboard. One of the guests said, in the true spirit of Karla’s Beastie Boys song, “Oh what the heck, the girls are dead, you can’t bring them back, why not part'?”

  “You don’t have to talk to them.” Dorothy Homolka told Lynn McCann about Paul’s defense lawyer’s private investigators. “And you’d have nothing to say in his defense, anyway.”

  To her co-workers at the Shaver Clinic, Dorothy appeared to be basking in the spotHght. She was overheard on the telephone talking to a dog trainer about Buddy the Rottweiler, who by that time had wreaked havoc on the tiny Homolka household. Dorothy loudly exclaimed her astomshment at the fact that the person she was speaking with did not know who she was. Lynn ignored Dorothy. Lynn said Dorothy Homolka was a very strong-willed person, like her daughter. According to Lynn, Dorothy “can put on a big act, if she wants to.”

  The fix was in and all the solicitors’ eloquent words were as dust in the wind. There was a distinct ^lice-through-the-Looking-Glass atmosphere in the courtroom that Tuesday morning— everything seemed to be reversed; nothing made sense.

  Judges in Canada have been very quick to seal their courtrooms or issue sweeping pubHcation bans that make a mockery

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  of the idea of an open, democratic society. Unlike Americans, who have been reared on the notion that happiness is to be pursued and Hfe and Hberty are God-given rights, Canadians have ideahzed law, order and another outrageous oxymoron: good government. There is no tradition of civil disobedience in Canada.

  Kovacs ruled that the American media and the general public were to be excluded from the courtroom. Even though the courtroom in St. Catharines only held 160 people in total— between the press, the police, the families and the lawyers, there were only seventy-five seats left—the public could not be trusted to keep its mouth shut. Kovac’s order was less enforceable in the United States than it was in Canada, so the American media were out.

  The Canadian media could remain. Although they could not publish what they heard, they could listen to what was said. They were being allowed to bear witness, Justice Kovacs said. The ban was so broad that even Karla’s plea was a prohibited bit of information. Her sentence could be published, but not the fact that she had pled guilty.

  Murray Segal read into evidence a cursory, bare bones rendition of what Paul and Karla had done to her sister, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. The press was both breathless and speechless.

  Previously, the press had no details about this case. Now that they had them, they could not publish. It was probably the two for Tammy, with impunity, that was the real breath-taker. That, and the fact that it was immediately evident to everyone that Karla could have saved all three girls’ lives, and that Kristen French ^ould never have been kidnapped if not for Karla. The sister was the astonishing kicker. Still the Canadian media unanimously respected the ban.

  Sergeant Bob Gillies and another officer drove Karla to prison that evening. In the van they had her Mickey Mouse posters and her new color TV. They arrived in Kingston at

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  10:00 P.M. The next day, Dorothy and Karel Honiolka granted formal permission to exhume Tammy Lyn’s body.

  Karla wrote to Kristy Maan: “I’m eUgible for full parole in 4 years. Not bad … Court on Tuesday was absolute hell … That judge really hated me big time … Please write soon, It’s lonely m here.”

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  t. Catharines’ Victoria Lawn Cemetery is in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. A highway runs through it, and that makes it unique. The cemetery was designed by Fredrick L. Olmsted. Olmsted had designed Central Park in New York. There are more than sixty thousand graves on either side of the highway. A double plot goes for about sixteen hundred dollars.

  With Karla in the Kingston Prison for Women and Paul Bernardo held indefinitely without bail in the Metropolitan

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  East Detention Center, the tent finally went up around Tammy Lyn’s grave on the morning of July 20.

  At first there were only four workers from Alexander Awnings, a couple of uniform cops. Sergeant Ivan Madronic and Sergeant Brian Nesbitt. No way the media, who had been camping out at the cemetery every day for weeks anticipating the disinterment, were going to get any pictures of Tammy’s waterproof, airtight cement vault being Hfted out of the grave, not as long as Inspector Vince Bevan was in charge.

  They started using the hydraulic hfters to get the vault out around eight; it was a rather delicate operation, the straps had to be just right or the thing would fall and spht open and there would be hell to pay.

  Eventually there were dozens of uniforms and plainclothes, as well as five coroners and other attendant officials around the grave. There was the frineral director George Darte and a priest, even though the Homolkas were not Cathohc.

  By 9:00 a.m., there were so many upright bodies that Sergeant Riddle was assigned to make a list. With the tent and the media and Riddle dihgently scribbHng in his notebook, an observer might easily have thought it was a mob frineral. It took more than four hours to get Tammy Lyn’s casket out of the ground. It w^as placed in a hearse marked MacKinnon & Bowes Limited Removal Service and driven to the coroner’s building in Toronto.

  The forensic pathology unit at the morgue in Toronto had a full complement of interested bystanders, as well. The chief coroner, Dr. Jim Young, was there, as was the deputy chief. Dr. Jim Cairns. Inspector Bevan and Sergeant Brian Nesbitt were there. Constable Michael Kershaw was taking pictures. Two or three other officers, waving the task force flag, stood around shufrhng their feet.

  There were two pathologists—Dr. David King from Hamilton and Dr. Noel McAuliffe. Dr. McAuliffe would do the actual work. There were half a dozen assistants, six other doctors, a few more cops and various people from the facility, including

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  an X-ray technician. They all took notice of how well-preserved Tammy was.

  Tammy’s casket was a repository of curious items—a small brown teddy bear with a yellow ribbon around its neck; a photo of Mr. and Mrs. Homolka in a restaurant; a close-up of Paul and Karla with “Show 1988” written on the back; another picture of Paul and Karla at the site of their engagement; a Sir Winston Churchill ‘88—89 student-card picture of Lori; an envelope from Paul and Karla’s wedding, containing a book of Paul and Karla matches, the invitation, reception card and a napkin for June 29, 1991; a blue and white nylon soccer jacket with a Cobra emblem on the back; a silver-colored neck chain with a peace emblem; a small soccer ball, a rope cord with a CGIT (Canadian Girls in Training) ‘87 pin; a candy-cane wrapper; a letter from both Paul and Karla dated i:>ec. 27, 1990; a little picture of Jesus Christ; a plastic heart with three small flowers arranged around it; and a letter from Tammy’s friend Tricia Garcia.

  The corpse was wearing red-and-white socks. The socks were decorated with bunnies dressed in Santa Claus outfits. The gray track pants had the bottoms rolled up and Tammy’s white-and-black sweater was patterned with little Scottish terriers.

  Around the left wrist there was a silver chain; on the right-hand ring finger, a small ring; gold-colored earrings in the pierced ears; that flat gold-colored chain Karla had been wearing the night Tammy died—the same one that had become caught in her mouth like a horse’s bit while she and Paul were making their Christmas video was clasped around the corpse’s neck. The ring on the chain was a man’s, gold with a diamond setting.

  The doctors took scalp hair, vaginal packing, a couple of vaginal swabs, some skin from the left side of the face, an oral swab, muscle tissue from the
left arm, a kidney, breast tissue, pubic hair, a segment of the small bowel, rectal packing, muscle tissue from the left thigh, a segment of the large bowel, some fat from the right thigh, a lung and the liver. Dr. McAuliffe had never had such a large audience and he was very thorough. It was possible that something significant could be discovered in a

  body that had been embalmed and buried for two and a half years.

  Why they were looking for traces of Halcion and halothane was anybody’s guess. Given the unstable chemical nature of halothane, it was almost untraceable in the recently deceased. All that would be proven by the presence of these drugs in Tammy Lyn’s remains was what Karla had already admitted— that she had kiUed her sister by administering a lethal combination of Halcion and halothane. The authorities were also trying to determine the cause of that massive burn on the left side of Tammy Lyn’s face—which was still quite evident even though decomposition had taken its deliberate toll.

  On the swabs and packing they would look for semen and compare the pubic hair to other hairs that had been found in a folded paper towel in a brown paper bag containing six hairs and a fingernail, which the pohce had recovered from the north closet in the master bedroom at 57 Bayview.

  Around 4:00 p.m., Inspector Bevan took Sergeant Nesbitt’s notebook and left the room. When he returned he declared that the Homolkas had instructed him to remove the pictures of Paul and Karla, the ring on the necklace and the letter from Paul and Karla and all the pre-printed wedding paraphernalia from the casket. They left the gold necklace.

  Tammy Lyn’s body was back in its grave by nine that night. Constable Kershaw retrieved samples of Eckels arterial dyno-tone, and Eckels fumeless dyno, the embalming fluids they had used on Tammy Lyn at the George Darte Funeral Home, and delivered them to the Keith Kelder, a scientist at the forensic center.

  There was another spot of blood on a blanket the Identification officers had found in the house, and the decision taken was to test it at a lab in Helsmki, Finland. If the results placed Leslie or Kristen in contact with that blanket, then it bolstered the case against Paul Bernardo.

  The sample had to be hand delivered. Chain of possession was important in evidential matters. The question of who

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  would go to Helsinki was easy: the only available senior officer with a passport. Inspector Vince Bevan.

  Bevan took his wife. One evening while they were waiting for the lab results, the Bevans took a dinner cruise. On their way in to port. Inspector Bevan was taken aback when a German tourist tapped him on the shoulder and inquired if he was not Inspector Vince Bevan, the chief investigator in that Bernardo case?

  On the third of August, Karla spent her first night in her jail cell. Although she had been in prison since July 8, she had been resident in the hospital unit for assessment. She had her first official therapy session as a prisoner with the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Roy Brown.

  Dr. Brown was the proverbial old soldier. Born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, on July 29, 1926, he was sixty-eight years old. He joined the Royal Navy in 1943, trained as a pilot and exited the service as a sub-lieutenant (A) after serving in the Pacific.

  His medical degree was in emergency medicine, dermatology and venerology from the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1952 and then completed one year in internal medicine with an emphasis on psychosomatic disorders, followed by a two-year course in psychiatry from which he graduated in 1958. He practiced psychiatry in the Canadian military until 1976.

  Then he retired and moved to Kingston, where he embarked—part-time—on a second career as a practicing psychiatrist working on government contracts. At the point when Dr. Brown met Karla, he had almost fully retired. The women’s prison was his last contract.

  For profile, in Dr. Brown’s long prison experience, Karla was without peer. Dr. Brown noted that Karla was “undergoing some increased stress”—undoubtedly related to the fact that she had finally been put in a closet with bars.

  K4W, as the Kingston Prison for Women was known throughout Canada, was well over a century old, and had more in common with one of those nightmarish Piranesi gothic vi—

  sions of hell than a modern correctional facility. Karla’s cell was no more than six by ten feet. K4W was a turbulent place.

  Karla was allegedly havmg bad dreams, and Dr. Brown offered to refer her to a psychologist, but “she declmed, saying, “I don’t want to discuss my life with anyone else.” Karla was sufficiently alert to record that Paul was back in court about the “murders and my assault” in her datebook on August 5.

  On August 31, Karla’s datebook said “Bob + Ivan visiting.” “Bob + Ivan” were Sergeants Bob Gillies and Ivan Madronic, both of w^hom had been assigned by Inspector Vince Bevan to handle Karla in prison. The task force had now shifted its focus to the prosecution of Paul Bernardo. The delicate care and feeding of its star witness w^as tantamount.

  Karla told the two sergeants that prison conditions were far better than she had expected. They reviewed the injuries she said she had received at Paul’s hand and a recent letter to Kathy Ford in which she said Paul had kicked her in the ribs sometime in the summer of 1992. No, she had not gone to the doctor, Karla told them, but did they know that in grade twelve, after she met Paul, her grades went down? Also, she had not confided in the prison psychiatrist; she wanted her own psychiatrist, but the prison had said no. Could anything be done?

  Karla had immediately enrolled in a non-degree entry-level university program, with a concentration on sociology and psychology. The correspondence course would begin on September 13, 1993, and Karla could hardly v/ait. Dorothy was going around telling anyone who would listen that Karla was a victim, just like the dead girls. Karla had unlimited access to the telephone and called her mother every day at work.

  Dorothy and Karel were just thankful that Karla was away from Paul and safe. Many of the staff at the Shaver Clinic were deeply troubled by the fact that Dorothy had never shown any remorse for anything Karla had done, but they had been officially instructed to indulge Mrs. Homolka, so they did.

  On September 5, Karla wrote to Kristy Maan. “I’m really sorry to hear that you feel the way you do. I can’t and won’t try to justify anything to you. I was under the impression that friends were friends, no matter what. ‘A fi-iend is one who

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  knows all about you and loves you just the same.’ Thank God almost all of the people I call my friends truly are my friends. I’m very disappointed, Kristy, but I’m not about to try and change your mind. Thanks for everything you’ve done for me in the past and good luck in the future.

  “P.S. By the way I think about everyone involved, every fucking day. It kills me inside to know aU of the hurt inside everyone’s heart, least of all my own. I just can’t deal with it or I’ll die inside.

  “And don’t bother trying to defend my actions. It’s not your place to do that. That’s my family’s position and people who really care about me. Kristy, your letter hurt me deeply, I just want you to know that.

  “And also, if you can’t accept things now, wait until Paul goes to trial and the publication ban is lifted. Then you will really hate me. So I guess it’s better for the both of us that things happened now instead of later. You will never understand what he did to me and no amount of explanation will make you understand.

  “And you know what else really amazes me? I get letters everyday from strangers telling me that they understand that I was dragged into this and that I am a victim, too. The police think I’m a victim. One person even told me he thought I was more of a victim than Kristen and Leslie are! And one of my friends turns against me?”

  Adjusting to life behind bars was a bit like adjusting to summer camp for Karla, even though it meant living in a cell the size of her old clothes closet. At the msistence of the Crown, she had been placed in segregation. In general population Karla would be dead, cons being less forgiving th
an pohce and prosecutors. “It’s not so bad up. here,” Karla wrote to Dr. Arndt on September 9, explaining that she planned to stay in segregation for her entire sentence because “people do get stabbed in here, and people do get killed.” She had personalized her cell with Mickey Mouse posters and all her other “stuff.” She told Dr. Arndt she was setding in nicely.

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  “Four other girls live here with me and they’re all nice,” her letter continued. “We’re usually let out of our cells at night from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. to socialize. We usually watch TV, play cards and Trivial Pursuit and talk.” All in all, Karla and her happy coterie of fellow segregation inmates were trying “to concentrate on having fun, rather than being in prison.”

  Karla had a few problems. “The health care sucks,” she wrote, and she could not get Valium because it was considered a “commodity among inmates.” Still, in her lengthy diatribe to Dr. Arndt, written on notepaper decorated with cartoon teddy bears nuzzling noses on a park bench, she managed to give a precise list of the drugs she was still allowed—Tegetrol for the one seizure she had had, the antidepressant Surmontil, and a combination of Nozinan and Benadryl to help her sleep.

  With the descriptive precision of a physician, she listed her concerns about the effect of certain drug combinations on her red blood cells and asked Dr. Arndt for his professional opinion. She had scant use for the resident psychiatrist, whom she said she was seeing twice a week. “I really don’t hke him,” she explained in her loopy handwriting. “He’s nice enough and all, but I just don’t feel comfortable talking to him, nor do I trust him. Someone in here (another inmate) told me that what you say to any doctor in here can be told to the parole board. That really makes me distrust him.”

  In the Correctional Services Canada psychological services clinical progress files, Karla was called Carla Teale. Her federal prison service number was 287308D. She wrote to firiends explaining that although breakfast came at 7:30 in the morning, she did not get up until 9:30, because she did not eat breakfast.