Karla had just told Walker and Inspector Bevan otherwise. Gaining confidence in the concept of “recovered memory,”
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now Karla thought she might have enticed Jane Doe solely on her own. Karla was starting to “remember” that Paul was out at the time. Since Paul had been out and had never met Jane, Jane’s seduction, stupefaction and rape could hardly have been under his directions… .
Dr. Brown concluded his letter by saying, “I trust this will be helpful to you, and hope that Karla’s future court appearance will not cause a setback in the progress she has made to date. She will, of course, continue to require long-term therapy for the foreseeable future.”
John Rosen had wanted to be a doctor. His first years at university were devoted to the study of science—no time for the arts. Although he had lost his youthful faith in the medical profession, his approach to the law was rigorously scientific. He thought of himself as a logical man. There was nothing interpretative or sentimental or philosophical in the way John Rosen looked at any of his matters before the bar.
Take Karla’s story about her sister’s death and particularly the phrase “fucking disgusting,” upon which she had focused after the videotapes had surfaced and everyone could see that she was uncomfortable in that particular, brief six-minute scene.
The facts were these. Karla was barely out of her teens and hving at home with her family when she killed her sister. Her sister had died in the midst of a sexual assault that she had facilitated, and that she and her boyfriend, Paul Bernardo, had perpetrated.
Paul Bernardo knew nothing about drugs; Karla knew a great deal about drugs. When Karla obtained the drugs and organized the plan to drug her sister, Paul was working full-time in Toronto. Karla cheated, Hed and stole to get them. In the videotape of the Homolka’s happy Christmas that year, Karla Homolka was effervescent, relaxed and playful. There was another explanation for why Karla had said “fucking disgusting,” and Rosen would surely get to that.
Then came Jane Doe, about whom Karla was “recovering memory.” Otherwise, Karla’s memory was impeccable. She re—
niembered with disarmingly lucid accuracy everything else, including the day Corrina Jenkins was raped on Henley Island. Karla remembered that incident, she had said, not because Paul came home and declared himself, but because it was Karla’s cat’s birthday.
Karla’s version of how LesHe Mahaffy died was problematic and did not make sense. Karla said Paul Bernardo beat Leslie. Karla said she agreed with Paul when he concluded that Leslie Mahaffy had to die. Karla believed Leslie could probably recognize Paul and they would be caught and go to prison. Karla said Paul had strangled Leslie with some electrical cord he just happened to have handy. Once again, even though Karla was there in the room when Paul allegedly strangled Leslie, she saw, but did not see. For Karla, it did not matter whether it was live or Memorex, she possessed this remarkable facility where she saw but did not see.
From the pathology it was impossible to know for sure whether or not Leslie had been strangled, because her neck had been decimated by a power saw. However, the postmortem revealed none of the other nine or ten usual indices of strangulation.
After studying all the pathology and talking to the pathologist, Rosen came to the conclusion that Karla was lying again. Leslie Mahaffy had not been beaten. There was no evidence that she had been hit anywhere by anyone. What there was were two unexplained, equidistant, asymmetrical, subcutaneous bruises, chest high, on either side of her back. It looked as though someone had knelt forcefully on LesHe Mahaffy’s upper back. Those marks were the only marks on her body and they were not visible to the naked eye.
Karla also said that Paul cut up Leslie Mahaffy’s body by himself while Karla was at work. She stated that Paul obtained all the cement, carried the twenty-two, sixty-pound bags to his car, then out of the car at 57 Bayview, down the basement stairs, mixed it and encased Leslie’s various body parts in small cement coffins he shaped, using cardboard boxes he had also
obtained somewhere. Then he returned the twelve unused bags of cement for a cash refund. According to Karla, he did all this while Karla was at work, between Monday morning and Wednesday evening. One other thing, as Karla would say: Paul disposed of most of the cement blocks by himself—Karla only helped with the two-hundred-pound block containing the torso.
What Karla said Paul had done was impossible, unless Paul had, as Sergeant Riddle once suggested, “magical powers.” Even for someone with magical powers, dismembering a body would be time-consuming and messy. Dismembering it with a power saw would spew pieces of flesh, skin, bone and blood forty feet in all directions. During the ten weeks the crime-scene analysts were in the house, they did not find any evidence of Leslie Mahafly m the basement or anywhere else in the house. They picked up blood splatters and ten thousand pieces of hair, but not one speck, not one hair belonging to Leslie Mahaffy.
Paul Bernardo had no history to persuade anyone that he had suddenly decided the best way to hide a body was dismember it, encase the parts in cement and dump it into the lake.
On the other hand, Karla was involved in surgery and autopsies all the time. Animals were just like humans, she kept telling everyone. It only seemed logical that Karla had been instrumental in the dismemberment of Leslie Mahaffy on Sunday evening, after their parents had gone home, the way Paul Bernardo said she was.
With tarps the two had made a tent around the power saw. Karla helped Paul dismember the body, piece by piece, and then she washed each piece, put it in a plastic garbage bag and carried each of the ten body parts to the root cellar, where they were stored overnight.
Paul and Karla took down all the tarps, folded them up and with the other refuse, then threw them in the Dumpster behind the Martindale Animal Clinic. Karla had the necessary keys to the Dumpster.
There was one other thing. Murray Segal had been rightly curious about Karla’s insistence that there were ten boxes;
therefore, ten blocks containing the body parts. Karla knew there were ten packages of body parts, because she had handled them. She just assumed that Paul had given each body part its own little box. But he did not. He doubled up a couple of pieces, producing only eight blocks in the end. Karla was undoubtedly involved in the dismemberment, but not in the cement work. If she had been, Rosen assumed, it would have been done properly and the body parts would never have been found.
Karla had been the subject of more scrutiny, more evaluations, had taken more drugs and had more “therapy” than Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath put together. Paul Bernardo had been in prison for two years, with nothing more than a cursory new prisoner-suicide evaluation. Karla had had a lot and Paul had none. Rosen thought it was only fair that Paul get some, but he did not want the prosecution to have access to reports—in case he decided to plead insanity. It was no mean feat getting Justice LeSage to remand Bernardo to the Royal Ottawa Hospital for a lengthy psychiatric assessment.
By getting the judge to remand his client to the hospital, rather than grant a motion for a psychiatric assessment, Rosen managed to circumvent any obligation he would have otherwise have had to provide the Crown with psychiatric reports. It was a small but satisfying coup.
Although Bernardo was undoubtedly a sexual psychopath with sadistic tendencies, kiUing did not appear to be part of his paraphilia.
When Rosen focused on Kristen French, he also found a number of inconsistencies in Karla’s version of events and one deeply disturbing, strangely unaddressed fact.
Kristen had been severely beaten around her face and mouth and had aspirated enough blood to kill her. Although the videotapes showed Paul hitting Kristen on the back and even on the back of the head, Karla never said anything about Paul hitting Kristen in the face, let alone hitting her hard enough to
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beat her to death. Neither could the pathologist conclusively say she had died from strangulation.
While Paul Bernardo
underwent a battery of psychiatric tests, John Rosen faced other distractions. The families of the victims sought and were granted intervenor status to argue that the videotapes showing their daughters being assaulted and raped should be suppressed and not shown as evidence in open court. They soHcited affidavits from clergy who said that the video camera had captured the souls of their dead daughters. As a consequence, screening the videotapes in open court would be seen as an invasion of privacy to which the dead were allegedly entitled.
The families also flew in an anti-pornography crusader from the United States. Catherine MacKinnon was a questionable resource. In some American feminist circles, she was considered a crackpot. For instance, it was also her published view that consensual sex within a marriage could be viewed as rape.
Ms. MacKinnon viewed the tapes twice: once, early on, at the home of Rosen’s colleague Clayton Ruby. MacKinnon and Ruby were acquainted. Without clearing it with Rosen first. Ruby screened the tapes for MacKinnon, hypothefically to solicit her “expert” opinion on behalf of the defense.
The second time MacKinnon screened the videos she was working for the prosecution, which had aUied itself on this issue to the victims’ families’ position. Ms. MacKinnon pronounced the tapes pornography and began proselytizing about the damage these tapes would do to public morals, were they to be played in open court. In fact, the videotapes were the trophies of sexually deviant psychopaths and evidence in a murder trial. John Rosen knew that restricting the presentation of evidence in a murder trial was a dangerous precedent with cavernous pitfalls. It would also further protect Karla Homolka. LeSage reserved judgment.
490 STEPHEN williams
Jury selection was a psychopath’s dream: a hotel ballroom—the same hotel in which Inspector Vince Bevan and his bevy of crack investigators had taken up residence—chockablock with a thousand citizens to whom Paul Bernardo could personally declare his innocence. The prosecution and the defense had finally agreed that it would be very difficult, given the inordinate publicity generated by the case, to select twelve fair-minded, untainted individuals from among the great unwashed. It wasn’t.
On the afternoon of May 1, Paul Bernardo was required to stand up and answer all nine charges, which were read out, one by one, like a Satanic liturgy: To each of the nine charges, Paul Bernardo rose and replied in loud, clarion, dulcet tones, “Not Guilty.” It was more like what evangehst Jimmy Swaggart called a “camp meeting” than anything judicial. Paul Bernardo was m his glory.
If they had not impaneled a small army, the process would have taken half a day. From the first sixty people, Rosen and Houlahan could have selected two juries. As it was, finding twelve jurors only took three days.
To George Walker, the bureaucrats were anything but “faceless.” Legal Aid records showed that Walker spent many hours with four people in particular: Rosen’s ex-coUeague and an assistant deputy minister, Michael Code; a senior Crown official named Leo McGuigan; James A. Treleaven, the director of the Regional Crown office in Hamilton; and of course. Walker’s old acquaintance, Murray Segal.
Were they or were they not going to charge Walker’s client? They had had ample time to decide. Walker was convinced that these elaborate discussions were purely theatrical, held for posterity and pubhcity’s sake. This way, no one would be able to say that these “faceless bureaucrats” had not agonized over their decision and considered all the permutations and ramifications.
Walker had yet another intense meeting with all concerned on May 18 in Toronto. By then, the trial was in fijll swing. The previous time Walker had been with “the boys” in April, the meeting had lasted four hours. This one lasted three. Walker
came back again on June 1. They had reached a decision. Rosen was stunned. They gave Karla “blanket immunity” with respect to Jane Doe and anything else she might suddenly remember she had done. The community was outraged.
On June 10, Walker had a chat with Ray Houlahan to try and determine exactly when Houlahan expected to call Karla. She was driving Walker nuts and he would like to be able to give her a definite answer. They talked for an hour and a half.
Walker did not receive formal notification until June 15, 1995:
After careful consideration we have decided that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute Karla Homolka on a charge of aggravated assault. I am advised that Inspector Bevan has accepted our advice.
On June 20, just before Karla was to take to stand. Walker explained the situation in detail during an hour-long telephone conversation. Karla understood perfectly. It was Paul Bernardo’s trial. It had nothing to do with her. Karla was not on trial; she was a Crown witness whom they no longer really needed, given their other evidence, but they were going to put her through it and make her live up to her end of the bargain. She had immunity. It was more for show than anything else. All symbolism aside, Karla was unassailable. Karla was very pleased. She had been waiting to testify against Paul Bernardo for two years. She was very much looking forward to it. She was also looking forward to meeting the famous John Rosen.
When Ray Houlahan rose to make his jury address he told the members of the jury that Karla Homolka, like Paul Bernardo, was guilty of first-degree murder, but that the prosecution had long ago decided to make a deal with Karla in return for her testimony. Karla Homolka was not on trial.
Houlahan looked menacingly at Paul Bernardo and pointed. “But he is.”
thirty-three
ntouchable, Karia finally took the witness stand on June 25, 1995. During those first days, as prosecutor Ray Houlahan took Karla through the videotapes, once again, step by step, frame by frame, there was an interview on the radio with a British psychiatrist serving in Rwanda.
The interviewer wanted the psychiatrist to tell her about the busloads of tourists who had recently been turning up in Rwanda’s war-torn landscape in search of mass graves. These
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tourists not only wanted to see the sites where massacres had occurred but also the hundreds of dead bodies left to rot in the African sun. The interviewer wanted to know who these “tourists” were.
Frankly, the psychiatrist said quietly, these tourists were just like him and the interviewer.
The interviewer was taken aback: “But surely we should revile these people?”
“No,” he rephed. “We should try to understand them.”
To the prosecutors, Karla was a tourist at a massacre. First they wanted the jury to hear what Karla had seen, and then they wanted the jurors to try and understand her.
The prosecution was determined that the jury should see Karla as they did: a hapless, battered woman; the “compliant victim” of a sexual sadist.
This prosecutorial determination to define and explain Karla allowed John Rosen to solicit a different psychological perspective. When Dr. Graham Glancy was approached by Rosen he quickly agreed. An expert in battered woman’s syndrome and posttraumatic stress disorder, Dr. Glancy would evaluate the credibility of the prosecution’s doctors’ overall conclusions that Karla was battered and suffering from the disorder. Confident that he could shed some meaningful light on the woman who had been described by one of the Crown’s experts as “something of a diagnostic mystery,” Dr. Glancy asked his colleague, psychologist Dr. Nathan Pollock, to critique the three psychologists’ reports.
When Lorena Bobbitt bobbed her husband John’s penis and threw it out the car window, she was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Virtually every woman accused of a violent crime who had come before the courts since the middle eighties—PTSD was included for the first time in the revised third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III (R), published m 1987—had been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. PTSD had become the diagnostic fad of the nineties.
Originally derived from the condition called shell shock, first observed in veterans of World War I, posttraumatic stress disorder and its symptoms were fully described in a
book by Arthur Kardiner, first pubhshed in 1941, called Tlic Neuroses of War. The disorder had since been hypothecated and broadly diagnosed in veterans of the Vietnam War. The most poignant and accurate portrayal of a Vietnam veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder was Christopher Walken’s Academy Award-winning performance in the 1978 fihn Tlie Deer Hutiter.
The disorder was very difficult to treat and had an onerous prognosis: if the conditions were right and the person could be reached at all—Walken’s character was locked into a ceaseless, ultimately lethal compulsion to play Russian roulette—the disorder might be managed by sensitive, lifelong therapy.
The idea that the rigors of modern life could produce symptoms in an individual similar to the effects of war proved irresistible to the helping professions.
Looking at Dr. Allan Long’s test results. Dr. Pollock saw that they were simply WTong.
Firstly, everything done with Karla at Northwestern General Hospital had been suspect, because Karla had been completely stoned while she was there. Furthermore, Dr. Long had made an error in the computation of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality-Inventor'-2 (MMPI-2) subtest scores. Dr. Pollock pointed out that Dr. Long appeared “to have plotted the raw scores from the MMPI-2 on the profile form designed for the first edition of MMPI.”
So much for Karla’s diagnostic benchmark, which said people like Karla “feel socially inadequate, alienated and lack trust in others. They may be confused and distractable and are frequently diagnosed as schizophrenic.”
According to Dr. Pollock’s accurately scored MMPI-2 profile, Karla actually was the type of person who would readily report a wide variety of physical symptoms in order to achieve some kind of secondary gain. Karla was among those who fre—
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quendy saw “themselves as conventional, moralistic”: the kind of person “who does what is right.”
Karla’s corrected MMPI-2 profile indicated that she would categorically deny psychological problems. Karla would crave attention and affection and would be easily slighted when those needs were not met. However, her displeasure would be expressed in indirect ways. Her relationships were typically shallow and exploitive, with litde genuine concern for anyone other than herself
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 49
