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

by Williams, Stephen, 1949-

  Karla’s properly scored MMPI-2 profiled a person who saw herself as confident and socially adept, whereas others often saw her as narcissistic and egocentric. Karla’s kind was frequently diagnosed with “histrionic, obsessive-compulsive and/or passive-aggressive features”; traits that defined a classic psychopath.

  Dr. Pollock’s interpretation of Karla’s MMPI-2 scores was certainly more in keeping with the way Karla’s parents, sister and friends described Karla, and more in keeping with her behavior while she was in hospital, in court and in prison. She had thrived in a sea of attention bestowed upon her by a plethora of professional handlers and interlocutors.

  The notion that Karla had learned early in life to counter her underlying hostility by being passive and submissive was not borne out by Dr. Long’s account of his interview with Karla’s parents, who consistently described her as “a leader and somewhat bossy.” Neither did it jibe with anything Karla’s many friends had told the police during their myriad interviews.

  It got worse. Not only had Dr. Long scored Karla’s MMPI-2 incorrectly, but he had also relied on certain tests—such as TAT and the Rorschach—which were no longer considered useful in forensic assessment because their interpretation was, by definition, very subjective to the individual psychologist.

  In his late sixties, Dr. Long could safely be said to be from “the old school.” Indeed, he had eschewed more objective options such as the Exner Comprehensive System and had used his best judgment to interpret Karla’s responses to the pictures and inkblots. Given the fifty years between them—Karla’s psycho-pathology aside—how much subjective access could Dr. Long have had to Karla’s world?

  With regard to TAT and Rorschach, Dr. Long’s conclusions seemed totally arbitrary. Rather than “depressed, withdrawn and remorseful,” Dr. Pollock would have described Karla as “an immature, moody, shallow, rigid, hostile” woman, “preoccupied with themes of violence and victimization.”

  Karla’s anxiety, tension and depression did not represent the lingering effects of battered woman’s syndrome, or posttraumatic stress disorder, but were related to her reaUzation that she was “going to be prosecuted and jailed for heinous crimes.” At least, that was how Dr. Pollock would have interpreted Karla’s test results.

  On the morning of July 5, John Rosen was no longer slumped in his chair, looking Hke a petulant Danny DeVito. There had not been much for Rosen to do over the past two months— except the morning crossword puzzle—while the Crown paraded a phalanx of witnesses through the courtroom. The prosecution called the fishermen who had found Leslie Ma-haff^‘s body parts. They subpoenaed the guy who controlled the water levels in Lake Gibson. They even flew in the world’s only power-saw-cuts-made-in-human-bones expert from his obscure lab at the University’ of Tennessee, in Memphis.

  Dr. Steven Symes acquitted himself well by lecturing the jury as he would have done a dozen students. He pointed out that power saws used to dismember human bodies made a remarkable mess.

  The next man they called knew more about the mechanics and makes of power saws than Talmudic scholars knew about the To rah. To this man, a power saw was a totem, hke Mark DeMarco’s Masonic skull. They called the frogmen who had found the cement cofFin that had briefly contained LesHe Ma-haff>”s torso in the rnurky waters of the reservoir. There was a doctor from Kingston who the Crown presented as an expert on halothane.

  From a bottle he had with him on the stand, the doctor dabbed halothane on his face and chin, as if it were Old Spice, to demonstrate how harmless it was. The good doctor was cava—

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  lier, but since the potency of halothane was well documented and was irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of Rosen’s client, Rosen had few questions.

  There were other distracting moments of levity. When they called Dr. Patti Weir, the vet at the Martindale Animal Clinic, where Karla had worked, Paul Bernardo passed Rosen a note marked “Trivia,” which read, “Did you know that Patty Weir’s husband is the brother of a co-worker of the husband who married Laura Goode, the 2nd girl I ever slept with?”

  It also came to Rosen’s attention that they had relegated Inspector Tony Warr, who was now the head of the Toronto pohce sexual-assault squad, to furtively follow certain members of the jury. In particular, he trailed one retired white-haired gentleman whom the press corps had coUegially dubbed “drinking man,” because he obviously enjoyed the odd pick-me-up.

  The memo addressed to Houlahan from Warr read, “On June 26, 1995 Juror #3 … went into Mahoney’s Bar in Etobicoke with a woman, possibly his wife and was heard to say something about ‘giving him (Paul Bernardo) ninety-nine years’ …

  “On June 27 he went for lunch at Hy’s, consumed alcohol … many people in the establishment seemed to know him.”

  The day the Maiden met the Raven was the day everyone had been waiting for. John Rosen was absolutely convinced that Karla Homolka could have killed both girls. But he was not naive enough to think that he could get Karla to admit that she “stopped the breath” of Leslie Mahaffy or Kristen French, thereby voiding her deal. The only scenario that would break the deal involved Karla taking the stand under oath and admitting that she had herself killed one or both the girls.

  Rosen also knew it was a largely irrelevant point. Even if Karla made that open confession, it would not exonerate his chent. As Houlahan had intimated in his opening address, both Paul and Karla were guilty of murder—arguably in the first degree—and his client was demonstrably and by his own admission privately guilty of all the other charges, each of which carried a life sentence, so what was the purpose?

  Nevertheless, Rosen was going to give Karla everything he had. The prosecution had put her in front of him, and now he was going to truncate every lie Karla had ever told and at least show her to be the bedeviled witch she was.

  “All rise.” Justice LeSage greeted the court with a crisp “Good morning,” and then instructed the court staff to show the jury in. LeSage knew Rosen was ready, but protocol dictated that he ask if he was. He called for the witness.

  Karla came through the back door in the courtroom like a debutante at a ball. The courtroom was hushed. Someone coughed. Just like a schoolgirl, Karla climbed up on the stand and adjusted her microphone. She was blond and petite and dwarfed by the architecture.

  Houlahan had kept Karla on the stand for nine days. Once again, the jury had been subjected to a viewing of Paul and Karla’s trophies, endless videotaped scenes in slow motion, irrefutably documenting unspeakable degradation. Frequently Houlahan would hold on a particularly grotesque frame so that he could make some irrelevant, pornographic point.

  “And what are you doing there, Ms. Homolka?” Houlahan would ask. And Karla would reply with blase candor: “Well, I’m performing cunnilingus on her, and then I am insertmg a wine bottle in her anus.”

  Houlahan was a very methodical man. He spoke in a monotone. By the time he called Karla Homolka, the press corps had nicknamed him Ray Halothane.

  LeSage had finally ruled that the taped sections showing the rapes and abuses of Leslie Mahafiy, Kristen French, Tammy Lyn Homolka and Jane Doe would only be seen by the jury, the lawyers, police, court staff, Paul and Karla. Only the audio portions of the tapes would be played in open court.

  At the beginning of the trial, Houlahan had insisted that the

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  jury sit through all the videotapes three times. Once in real time; once with the aid of a transcript of the dialogue, which the prosecutor’s office had prepared; and a third excruciatingly long presentation aided by the sworn testimony of Sergeant Gary Beaulieu, whose task it had been to study the videotapes and prepare an affidavit for the court.

  With the facility of slow motion and stop action, Sergeant Beaulieu pointed out numerous hermeneutic details in the videotapes. The fact that under normal circumstances ten minutes of either video that portrayed the assaults on Leslie Mahaffy or Kristen French would have been suf
ficient to eHcit the most severe verdict this jury could deliver seemed to have eluded the Crown law office.

  Karla had barely settled in the witness box when John Rosen was as dangerously near her as Jim Hutton had been that first night dancing at the Sugar Shack.

  “I’m going to show you a picture,” he said, holding up a photograph, as though he were a cop showing someone his badge. “Can you tell me who is in the picture?”

  “My sister Tammy,” Homolka answered.

  “Your sister Tammy—alive.” Rosen said, matter-of-facdy.

  Rosen then shoved another photograph under her nose, a photograph taken the night Tammy Lyn had died. Tammy lay white and dead on a gurney with the esophageal tube still protruding from her mouth. The only color in the picture was that huge, bright raspberry mark, mysteriously tattooed on her right cheek and throat.

  “Can you tell me who that is?”

  “My sister Tammy,” Karla said, appropriately taken aback, but not really shaken. A raspy sob, maybe, but no tears.

  “Your sister Tammy, in the morgue, with a red stain on her face, dead.”

  “She wasn’t that bad when I saw her,” Karla shot back. Rosen did not pause to ponder the oddity of that response.

  He went on to Leslie Mahaffy. A photo of Leslie alive, and

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  then one of Leslie’s purplish, headless, limbless torso, washed up on the shore of the reservoir.

  Rosen did the same again with Kristen French. First, a photograph of her smilmg broadly, very much alive, with her dog Sasha, and then a truly horrific picture of her brush-covered naked corpse, with its crudely shorn hair and grotesque grimace.

  By the time Rosen got to Kristen French, Karla was striving to act appropriately because she had figured out exactly what John Rosen was up to. Rosen was trying to appeal to her conscience. He even asked Karla about her conscience.

  Karla had a formidable abiht)’ to see where others were headed and she was not an inconsequential actress. Kim Doyle, the law clerk, who knew Karla as well as anyone, had not been in favor of this confi-ontational in-her-face approach.

  Doyle had reasoned that this stratagem would not really faze Karla because she believed, along with Dr. Glancy, that Karla was the rarest of all birds, a histrionic, a borderline personaht>’, completely disordered—a female psychopath. As such, just Hke her estranged husband, Karla had no conscience and no capacity for guilt. Karla actually would have appreciated the theatrical value of Rosen’s performance more than anything else, as Paul had appreciated the prop room.

  Doyle had favored a more covert approach, one in which Rosen would appear benign and somewhat beguiled, like every other older professional man with whom Karla had had contact.

  As it turned out, Doyle’s initial instincts had been right. Rosen’s performance was startUng and theatrical. Everyone was taken aback and enthralled. Except Karla, who, within a few minutes, was settling in, anticipating Rosen’s questions.

  From where Kim Doyle sat—directly in fi-ont of the defense table—she would swear she could hear Karla’s mind working. It sounded just like the soft whir of Doyle’s laptop computer, searching for some obscure witness’s name who supported her version of events, or key words and phrases in the hundreds of hours of conversations with prosecutors and pohce that Karla had stored in her not inconsequential data bank.

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  From August through December, 1994, the pohce and prosecution had suppHed Dr. Peter JafFe, Dr. Chris Hatcher and Dr. Stephen Hucker with all of Drs. Long, Arndt and Malcolm’s files and reports on Karla Homolka, as well as those of the prison consultants, Jan Heney and Dr. Roy Brown. They also made available to the doctors the six and a half hours of videotaped evidence, as well as the extensive videotaped statements Karla had given at the Journey’s End in May, 1993.

  Dr. Peter JafFe based his conclusions on his review of these materials and ten hours of interviews he conducted with Karla in the fall of 1994 at the Kingston Prison for Women. He also administered a few more psychological tests, including the MMPI-2.

  It was Dr. Jaffe’s opinion that Paul Bernardo had used emotional, physical and sexual abuse to coerce and manipulate Ms. Homolka into becoming involved in the sexual assaults and murders of her sister, Leslie Mahaff)^ and Kristen French, as well as any other deviant acts in which she might have participated.

  From his test results, JafFe concluded that Karla had made substantial improvement since Dr. Long’s first assessment. He found Karla to be functioning in the superior range of intelligence—the top two percent of the population.

  Dr. Jaffe’s interpretation of Karla’s MMPI-2 scores suggested paranoia, isolation, anxiety and anger that fluctuated between self-blame and hostihty, but the doctor attributed this to the traumatic effects of prison life and Karla’s involvement with Paul Bernardo.

  To conclude that Karla’s psychological profile was consistent with the experiences of abused women and a woman suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, Dr. Jaffe relied, in part, on two computerized interpretations.

  Rosen’s consultants, Drs. Graham Glancy and Nathan Pollock, found Dr. Jaffe’s results to be accurate—but rather than exphcative and redemptive, they contradictorily interpreted his results as explicative and damning. It was the way Dr. Jaffe had

  interpreted those results with which Glancy and Pollock took serious issue.

  The results rightly said Karla was chronically maladjusted, suspicious and hostile. If threatened, she would most likely respond with anger and hostility. While Karla could appear naive and trusting, she could also quickly become indignant and hostile. Karla was insecure and needed a great deal of reassurance. She could be petulant and very demanding. In addition, an evaluation on the Overcontrolled-hostility scale suggested that episodes of intense angry outbursts were common.

  Contrary to Dr. Jaffe’s stated conclusions, none of his test results suggested posttraumatic stress disorder.

  Dr. Pollock pointed out that Dr. Jaffe had only examined individual item content on MMPI-2 and rationalized pathognomic indictors to explain away evidence of chronic psycho-pathology. Even Dr. Jaffe himself, in a remarkably blatant attempt to cover all his bases, pointed out in his report that his method of interpretation was “quite risky” with an instrument such as MMPI-2, because MMPI-2 was meant to rely on verified reference groups and scale elevations, not item content. Nevertheless, he rejected the notion that the MMPI-2 results reflected an ingrained personality disturbance, which would certainly have been Dr. Pollock’s conclusion.

  The second computer program—the Rainwater Interpretive Report—was consistent with Jaffe’s first computer-aided interpretation. Dr. Jaffe had achieved a commendable consistency in his test results; it was his interpretation that was too convenient for the government’s position on Karla.

  According to Rainwater, Karla was a suspicious, egocentric and rigid person. Antisocial behavior (psychopathic behavior) was common to her type, and was characterized by lying, stealing, substance abuse, aggressive outbursts and sexual acting out.

  According to the Rainwater report, people such as Karla tended to be impulsive, irresponsible and rebellious. They frequently demonstrated strong feelings of hostility toward family members and were in conflict, either blatantly or subliminally, with authority. Their relationships were generally superficial

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  and they tended to have marital problems, which in Karla’s case was something of an understatement.

  Dr. Pollock pointed out that if the details of Dr. JafFe’s interpretation were accepted and his conclusions ignored, Karla would again be diagnosed as a severely disturbed borderline personahty, a histrionic, a psychopath.

  Chronological order was really the only way to conduct an effective cross-examination on Karla. There are always opportunities for excursions or elaborations, but a good lawyer never strays far jfrom the Book of Days. And Karla had made it rela
tively easy to stay the course with her voluminous, damning letters and love notes.

  According to the details of Dr. Jaffe’s interpretations and Dr. Long’s revised results, Karla was more than capable of having killed either one or both of the girls herself

  John Rosen was a student of science. In science, problems were approached pragmatically. If it looked hke a duck, sounded like duck and acted like a duck, it probably was a duck. Karla had killed her sister. Accidental or not, the circumstances were too diabolical. Given what Karla had seen and done, so was her demeanor.

  “Surprise,” announced Rosen when he started playing the videotape of Karla and Paul’s assault on her sister. “She’s wearing some sort of sanitary napkin, isn’t she?”

  Rosen wanted to take Karla back to that early Christmas Eve morning, scant minutes old, when Karla prodded her inert sister to make sure Tammy Lyn was out and then got the halothane and a white rag to make certain she stayed that way.

  “No, I never saw one,” said Karla, taken aback, and no doubt rewinding in her mind to the one mention of this cruel exposure of Tammy Lyn. It was on May 17, 1993, during her “cautioned” statements at the Journey’s End that Sergeant Bob GiUies had just happened to say: “Okay. What I have here is a copy of the postmortem report concerning your sister Tammy, and in the clothing and effects it mentions a sanitary pad?”

  Karla had deflected the issue quite handily by feigning em-

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  barrassment in front of the male officers. (Detective Metcalfe had taken sick that morning.) Karla said she had redressed Tammy and had not seen any such thing. “It could have been one of those very thin ones,” she offered. She herself always used Always, with wings, and those were “very, very, thin.”