Karla had told Walker about Jane Doe and her dreams. Karla
said she thought she had told several poHce officers as well as the prosecutors, Ray Houlahan and Greg Barnett. Karla thought Greg Barnett “typed it with his computer.” She had also told Dr. Brown that she had had a dream. In that dream, what had happened to Kristen happened to Jane. That was her new dream.
“I think I began to tell Bob things about Jane Doe,” Karla said to Walker, referring to Sergeant GiUies, “but I told him I couldn’t remember so he said: ‘Don’t tell me—only about what you remember.’ “
Walker left Karla at noon, quite certain that Karla had a handle on the situation.
John Rosen had his own problems. Carolyn MacDonald did not make the cut. There were noises within and without the Ministry of the Attorney-General about the possibihty that Ken Murray might be investigated and charged with obstructing justice for holding onto the videotapes for sixteen months, but there was another possibility—that Murray could be called as a witness for the prosecution against his former client.
The videotapes were the metaphoric equivalent of a “smoking gun.” The smoking-gun issue had eUcited a number of relatively consistent court rulings in the United States in recent years.
If a lawyer came into possession of physical evidence of a crime, that lawyer was required “professionally, ethically and legally” to immediately surrender such evidence to the authorities. By failing to do so. Ken Murray theoretically became a material witness.
The prosecution could easily call him to the witness stand and ask him exacdy where he had got the videotapes. The same possibility claimed Ms. MacDonald. Fortunately, the law clerk, Kim Doyle, escaped unscathed.
Doyle was fanatically dedicated. She had been the defense-team interviewer and client caretaker, a role she retained when she joined Rosen. She was devoted to the idea that they could “get” Karla Homolka. More importantly, because Doyle be—
INVISIBLE darkness 477
lieved Karla even less than her former bosses, Doyle’s encyclopedic knowledge of the case was already being shaped by one of the most important questions in this case—the credibility and culpability of Karla Homolka.
A high-profile case of this size and complexity was enormously time-consuming. An entire room was dedicated to storing the files and Crown Disclosure, which was contained in fifty-four Serlox-bound, legal-size, seven-inch-thick volumes. The Disclosure held all the prosecution’s background information on the Bernardos and Homolkas, witness interviews and statements, exhibit lists, forensic results, and the will-says of more than 240 police officers. A will-say is a written statement or report submitted by any officer who had anything whatsoever to do with the case; it reflects what they could say if questioned under oath. The various will-says in this instance ranged in length fi-om two paragraphs submitted by the cops who had driven Bernardo fi”om his interview to the jail in Toronto on the morning of February 18, to hundreds of pages supplied by officers such as Inspector Vince Bevan, Sergeant Larry Maracle and Detective Steve Irwin.
There was the same volume of material again to do with the Scarborough rapes and a whole new set of will-says from the Metropohtan Toronto PoHce. With the exception of Steve Irwin, there was no one individual officer who had worked on both investigations.
On top of everything else, Justice LeSage was being prickly about Rosen’s demands for an adjournment. Rosen had been vociferous about his displeasure, and had told the judge that he would not go on the record for Bernardo if his schedule could not be accommodated.
Karla knew that the only way she could garner any credibility was to confront the doubting policemen about Jane Doe alone. She waived her right to have George Walker present.
Walker had the Homolkas to his office for three-quarters of an hour on February 13, to apprise them of the situation and quell their fears about their daughter’s new troubles. He was
also at it again in earnest with Segal. Between February 13 and 17, Walker and Segal spoke on the telephone half a dozen times. Their conversations were lengthy. On February 16, Walker had a half-hour telephone conversation with Inspector Bevan.
On February 20, two members of the Green Ribbon Task Force, Staff Sergeant Steve MacLeod and Constable Scott Ken-ney, went to the Kingston Prison for Women to question Karla about Jane Doe.
At the beginning of the tape, Inspector Bevan can be seen briefly bringing Sergeant MacLeod a glass of water. The inspector was casually dressed. As if it were a tea party, he politely inquired whether anyone else wanted anything. Karla poUtely said, “No, thank you.” Then Sergeant MacLeod read Karla her rights—he sounded serious. Now she was “under caution” and anything she said could be used against her.
There were a dozen members of the Green Ribbon Task Force in town for these interviews. They set up the audio-visual equipment in the K4W conference room and placed Karla at the end of the table. MacLeod was on her right, Constable Kenney on her left. Inspector Bevan was overseeing the production. He had produced “The Abduction of Kristen French”; now he was going to produce “The Exoneration of Karla Teale.” Bevan had a possessive streak; he had referred to the two dead girls as “his ghosts,” and now Karla was “his evidence.”
These new sessions with Karla were shot in quarter-split screens. One stationary camera remained focused on Karla; another stationary camera shot the three individuals so that their interaction and paper shuffles could be monitored. The bottom-left quadrant recorded the videotape footage Karla was shown with times coded down to the hour, minute and second. The fourth-quarter spHt screen was blank. That quadrant must represent the unknowable, the unanswerable.
The first day was the hardest. But Karla persevered. During the first half hour, Karla was clearly anxious. This session would have interested Dr. Arndt. Karla actually cried a little—were there really tears? Whining, she eflSasively protested her innocence. It was not hard for Karla to act that way under the circumstances; her well-being was clearly threatened. She continued to remember nothing of what she saw; she feigned shock. Within fifteen minutes, her composure was back. She was, by turns, surprised, disgusted with herself and candid, taking the pohce officers into her confidence, explaining why she might not remember.
The sessions usually began in the middle of the afternoon. Karla and the two detectives greeted one another amicably. MacLeod and Kenney asked some generic questions and then they played that day’s videotape once through. They would then ask Karla if she had any general comments before they started with their barrage of questions in counterpoint to specific scenes on the videotapes to which they slowly advanced frame by frame or which they reached with fast-forward or reverse searches. Thus, they whiled away the afternoons and evenings with startlingly pornographic questions to which they got frank pornographic answers. Most of these daily sessions were six or seven hours long. As the detectives weakened, Karla got stronger and more relaxed. She checked “background music” titles for them, and she spotted bruises they had never seen. This was Karla’s Cannes and she was some kind of star, in all her naked, lurid glory.
The interviews with Karla continued through February 24. They covered every inch of those six and a half hours of videotape, frame by horrific firame. With Jane Doe, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, Karla’s affect was anything but fiat. But by now her lack of flat affect was beside the point.
One of the first things John Rosen noticed about Karla Homolka was her prodigious medical file. She had told everyone—George Walker, Drs. Arndt, Long and Malcolm, the police, her parents, Drs. Jaffe, Hucker and Hatcher, plus R.J. Houlahan that Paul would never let her go to the doctor. Yet during the three-year period between 1989 and 1992, Karla had been to the doctor twenty-six times, an average of 8.3 visits per year.
None of these doctors had noticed anything unusual about Karla’s mental state or her physical condition. According to
48o STEPHEN wiiir.ms
their records, Karla was a physically f
it, well-adjusted, young, white female.
Given the fact that the prosecution expert on battered woman’s syndrome, Dr. Peter Jaffe, had said in his report that Karla was abused—emotionally, sexually and physically—from the time she met Paul Bernardo, Rosen found this medical information indicative of the convenient gullibility of the authorities and their experts. Rosen learned that not only had Paul permitted her to see doctors, he had often arranged for her to do so.
In particular, the reports of Karla’s general practitioners. Dr. Valerie Jaeger and Dr. Christine Plaskos, held much interest for Rosen. Even though they had seen Karla regularly over the entire period she and Paul had been together, neither of those doctors ever suspected a thing. Both sets of doctors’ records contradicted everything Dr. JafFe and Karla said.
Until Karla was hospitahzed in early January, 1993, Dr. Plaskos saw no evidence of abuse. Afterward, when Karla returned time and again to Dr. Plaskos before and after her stay at Northwestern General Hospital, Dr. Plaskos did not find Karla to be depressed, suicidal or with a “flat affect.”
Karla complained about aches and pains, so Dr. Plaskos gave her a full physical. Since Karla was going to prison. Dr. Plaskos did her Woodwork, including HIV tests. It was all normal, and Karla was negative. Dr. Plaskos did find Karla to be very upset about her future and petrified about going to prison.
That Karla would he at the drop of the hat, if she perceived it to be in her own best interest or if her well-being was at stake, was demonstrable. From the experience vdth her former boyfriend and their Kansas sojourn, as well as the trip she and Paul had taken to Florida in the summer of 1988, she had no hesitation whatsoever about lying to her parents.
Even though she talked to the doctors about how wonderful her parents were, how she would not do this and could not do that to them, her real feehngs seemed to be contained in her expletive-filled ten-page missive to Debbie Purdie on February 19, 1991. Her real view of her parents was summed up in one statement: “What assholes.”
INVISIBLE darkness 481
Neither Dr. Arndt nor Dr. Malcolm thought Karla suicidal. But when Carolyn MacDonald and Ken Murray had examined Karla under oath in the summer of 1994, Karla said she had been heavily depressed and suicidal all the time.
She told the doctors and the police that she was at her worst—black and blue and beaten—when Norma Tellier and her friend Brian had been over to the house on December 27, 1992, but neither Norma, Brian nor Brian’s father had noticed anything wrong with Karla on that particular day.
Even the story about how Karla had actually left the matrimonial home had many versions. Her parents claimed they had had to physically drag her out, but to hear Karla tell it, she sat on the white loveseat in the living room and kibbitzed with her mother about Tammy Lyn’s relationship with Paul.
In one version, her father, sister and neighbors scurried around the house scooping up Karla’s personal effects so that she could survive the escape. In yet another variation, Karla had taken the time to thoroughly search the hiding places for the videotapes—upstairs, downstairs and in the garage—without telling anyone what she was looking for. There was a school of thought that said Karla had her own copy of the videotapes squirreled away somewhere.
Depending on her circumstances, Karla told different people different stories all the time.
Karla had hed in response to a whole series of questions MacDonald had asked Karla during their defense examination in 1994—-derived from Ken Murray’s review of the videotapes he had hidden away. Karla said she had never administered halothane to anyone except her sister. She said she had never given Halcion to anyone except her sister and Leslie Mahaffy. She quahfied that by saying that she vaguely remembered that she had given Jane Doe one Halcion pill. She had completely “forgotten” about Kristen French. Karla said she had never used Tammy Lyn’s underwear as a sexual prop.
In February, 1995, under caution, during the review of the video segment that concerned Jane Doe, Karla told the police she had never seen the tape before. That was a He. But then again, her entire version of her relationship with Jane Doe and
482 STEPHEN williams
what she and Paul had done to the teenager was a He. Through her intrinsic understanding of the dynamics of “recovered memory” and psychotherapy, lying—or forgetting, as Karla chose to call it—had the opposite effect on Karla than it had on Pinocchio. Karla became less obvious and more beguihng.
On other occasions v^th other police, she said she had seen the videotapes—but she had not really seen them. In Michelle Remembers, a book all about the alleged mechanics of remembering—“seeing” and “not seeing”—the fact that things could be deeply subUmated and then recovered is at the core of Michelle’s Satanic fairy tale. Michelle tells her therapist, “My inside eyes could sometimes see what my outside was doing… .” Karla felt just like Michelle.
When Karla told Detective Mary Lee Metcalfe that she had watched the videotapes but had not really seen them when she watched them, but she had watched herself watching them so she knew she had sort of seen them, Karla asked Detective Metcalfe if she knew what she meant? Detective Metcalfe said “yes.”
John Rosen did not know what Karla meant. Particularly since Karla had told both George Walker and Dr. Arndt that she had watched all the videotapes at one time or another, and that they were so horrible she had not enjoyed them at all.
But it was Karla’s stories about how the dead girls died that were most important to John Rosen and his chent. If Karla Ued about anything substantial, her deal was assailable. If Karla “stopped the breath” of any individual, her deal was void. If Rosen could prove that Karla’s stories about the death of any one of the three dead teenagers were apocryphal, and break her deal, then he would have performed a service to his client, himself and the community. Even though Rosen’s own client was guilty as sin—given the tidbits of forensic evidence and the videotapes, any jury would convict him—Paul Bernardo steadfastly maintained that Karla was as bad as he was. Rosen believed him. As far as Rosen could tell, the matter of Jane Doe had once again tossed Karla’s fate to the wind, and theoretically made her extremely vulnerable.
INVISIBLE darkness 483
Throughout March and April, George Walker kept the lines of communication with the Ministry wide open. There were lots of people to talk to. Segal was no longer alone. There was James Treleavan, Leo McGuigan, Brian Cover and Michael Code. Walker had even been talking to the mspector. On April 11, he had another half-hour telephone conversation with Bevan and was the recipient of a Bevanism: the police “were still reviewing the materials.”
By April 24, the Creen Ribbon Task Force was ensconced in the Colony Hotel in Toronto, a hop, skip and a jump from the courthouse in which Paul Bernardo’s trial would begin on May 1. Bevan had new letterhead printed with the Green Ribbon Task Force’s hotel address, phone, fax and 1-800 number.
Inspector Bevan wrote to Dr. Hatcher in San Francisco. He wanted further elaboration on Hatcher’s one-hundred-page report; Bevan needed to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Allegedly, Bevan was having doubts, wrestling with his conscience, tortured by demons—had he done the right thing when he facilitated the deal in the first place? Now that he suspected Karla was malingering, how could he assuage the nagging uncertainty? She was a black Madonna, but she was the only Madonna he had. He needed the esteemed doctor’s counsel and insight.
In Bevan’s letter, the inspector gave his own, concise summary of the Jane Doe matter and included the opinions of Dr. Brown, whose written opinions George Walker had provided. Bevan also shared the transcript of another private conversation he had with Dr. Peter Jaffe on the same topic. He wrote out a Hst of questions such as, “Why is Homolka’s recollection of these events blocked? She has some recall of the sexual assault which occurred in August, 1991, but no memory of the incident in June, 1991.”
“As you are aware,” Inspector Bevan
continued, “the Crown is currently arguing a number of legal motions in preparation for jury selection on May 1, 1995. Important decisions regarding the witness Homolka must be made in the very near future.”
Bevan’s atypical reticence drove Walker to talk to Dr. Brown again on April 26. He wanted yet another letter from the prison doctor.
Dr. Brown responded to Walker’s request by reiterating his agreement with all his colleagues’ posttraumatic stress disorder assessments. Dr. Brown pointed out that the disorder was apparently more severe and long-lasting when the “stressor” was of human design as opposed to a natural disaster. According to the well-meaning doctor, such things as “bombings, torture and death camps” tended to really disorient people and cause long-term psychological problems.
“Among the typical symptoms are depression, ‘psychic numbing,’ a loss of feeling and interest in social activities, and impaired memory and difficulty in concentrating,” Brown wrote.
Dr. Brown obviously knew nothing about the Sugar Shack and Karla’s relationship with Jim Hutton.
Dr. Brown incorrectly stated in this letter that Ms. Homolka had been forced by Paul Bernardo to abuse “mind-altering drugs.” The only mind-altering drugs Ms. Homolka had abused had been prescribed. The only other stupefying, state-altering drugs Karla had used, she had given to her sister and her htde “friend,” Jane Doe. Jane survived, the sister died.
Dr. Brown cheerfully went on: “The apparently systematic forms of abuse that Ms. Teale was subjected to amount, in my opinion, to the form of torture seen commonly in concentration camp reports and in ‘brainwashing’ techniques used in POW interrogation… .
“In my opinion, Ms. Teale has demonstrated a very detailed and consistent recall for most of the circumstances involving her relationship with her ex-husband and the role he played in the commission of the offenses. The gaps in her memory appear related to events in which she participated only under his directions …”
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 48
