Yesterday’s news hit home again when Justice Patrick LeSage suggested that Karla might want to take a closer look at what Mr. Rosen was showing her. Moving to within a few feet of the jury, the petite blonde leaned over and watched the scene unfold, frame by frame, frozen in surreal close-ups, on the large monitor in front of the jury box. To keep her hair out of her eyes, Karla pulled it back in much the same way she always had when fellating Paul. The jurors had already seen that move enough times to last a lifetime.
“See, that’s the sanitary napkin with belt,” Rosen said, as if he were asking her to identify something as undemable as a cloud in the sky. The male juror closest to the monitor nodded his head quickly in a moment of recognition.
When the tape was forwarded to the next set of coordinates, Rosen pointed out a “white bundle” on the floor near the end of the sofa, which he contended must have been Tammy’s personal-hygiene item. One of the older female jurors leaned back and eyed Karla, her lips pursed.
They had not seen that which was now leading them into even darker, more perverse, speculation. Some of the jurors wondered, given the fact that they had been required to review the tapes in such detail by the prosecution, why this detail had never been highUghted for them. For a few minutes, it was just like a virtual-reahty pornographic version of “Perry Mason,” suffused with meaningfril suspense. Just when they thought they had seen everything.
“Advance very slowly,” Rosen told his co-counsel. Tony Bryant, manning the 8mm Sony playback machine from the opposite side of the courtroom, was the one who had suggested that they use the original tapes. The fmer hues and truer color and clarity of the originals made all the details far easier to see.
“And then just as you bring your finger out … right
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there. You have red staining on your fingers. It’s not a lot of blood. It’s just a httle blood, right?”
Karla leaned in closer to the monitor’s screen. The frames kept churning by in real time as she rubbed her sticky right index fmger and thumb together before trying to rid herself of the damn spot. Then she put her forefinger back in, briefly, just 1 perfunctory poke, because Paul was telling her to put it “inside, deep,” and then taste it.
Karla was a fastidious person. She did not like what he wanted her to put in her mouth, so she looked into the camera and told Paul in what was hardly a submissive posture that it was “fucking disgusting,” before dabbing her lips with the cuff of her left sleeve and backing away with another toss of her blond hair.
“You take the hand out and you wipe it on the bed, because it has blood on it and he’s telling you to lick it and you don’t want tb lick your sister’s menstrual blood, right?” charged Rosen, to Karla’s weakened protest. “And that is why you said, ‘Fucking disgusting.’ “
“That is a lie,” Karla said in the firmest, precisest response she had so far given, but it sounded lame against Rosen’s visually aided hypothesis.
“Thank you,” said Rosen, and turned away with a punctilious flourish of his robes to look at the jurors. “Because you see. Miss Homolka, your whole story, the whole basis of your evidence is based and founded on your assertion that you were forced to commit these perverted acts on your sister … that you said ‘fucking disgusting’ because you did not want to do what he forced you to do to her, that he beat you for saying that and that, therefore, everything that followed had to be looked at with that explanation… .
“But if it turns out, as we analyze the video, that the real reason that the kinky sex that you and he were into soured was because your sister had either the beginning or the end of her period and you didn’t want to taste her vaginal blood, that’s a different complexion, isn’t it?”
5o6 STEPHEN wllllams
Dr. Chris Hatcher, from Cahfornia, had submitted his lengthy and discursive report to the prosecution on May 17, 1995. Unfortunately, Dr. Hatcher had reUed extensively on Dr. Long’s and Dr. Peter Jaffe’s conclusions about Karla.
Even though Dr. Hatcher concluded that Karla was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, he inexphcably acknowledged that the test results he had derived did not support that diagnosis.
From the lectern, Rosen called Karla’s attention to her previous evidence. She had said that she had seen Paul Bernardo beat Leslie Mahaff^’ while he was “grillmg” the captive girl about anything she might remember about things such as the color of his car before she had been blindfolded.
“He beat her; he beat her with his fists, right?” Rosen asked. Karla agreed. That’s what Karla had said. Rosen continued describing the closed-fist beating that Karla said she had watched but had been helpless to stop. “This girl must have been black-and-blue all over,” he suggested.
Karla had not seen “black-and-blue,” but she did agree that^ there would have been substantial internal bruising. jjj
“Did you know that if you beat somebody on the back with your fists—according to the pathologist—that it’s likely to bruise the muscles and cause it to bleed, and force the blood out of the little vessels if you hit them. Did you know that’s how a bruise happens?”
“Yes.” Karla knew all about bruises. She also knew about the three groups of muscle in the human back. She knew about the levels of bruising through different layers of tissue. jji
In the first autopsy, Rosen patiently explained, the patholo-’” gist had not found any bruising in the superficial layers of Leslie Mahaffy’s back; however, when they performed the second au- ! topsy, after they exhumed her body parts, they had seen some- | thing more. i
“They cut deeper,” he told her, and what they found were ! two bruises on either side of the spinal column. One was 8cm X i
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5cm and the other was 1.5cm X 6.5cm. “Two circles, almost side by side.”
The pathologist could find no evidence of the beating that Karla alleged had taken place. “Do you understand that, miss?” Rosen asked. Karla said she did.
“But what we do know is that these two little red marks are consistent with a pair of knees about the size of your knees on that back at the deepest layer, pushing the muscle against the ribs while you held her head down on a pillow and suffocated her, isn’t that right?”
Karla was taken aback. Jurors’ foreheads crinkled quizzically. Ray Houlahan leapt to his feet to object. Justice LeSage, who was as curious about this theory as anyone, allowed as how there was a basis for the question—but not necessarily the editorial comment about knee size. The jury had already seen plenty of videotape showing every aspect of Paul and Karla’s anatomy, and his knees were clearly much larger than hers.
Despite the effects of decomposition, Rosen’s review of the autopsy suggested that there had been none of the usual indications of strangulation, such as injury to the tongue, lips or teeth.
Rosen suggested to Karla that Paul had wanted to let Leslie go, just as they had the January Girl. Although she had originally told the police that Paul left the room to get an electrical cord to use in the strangulation of the drugged girl, who was sleeping with Bunky in her arms, the videotape clearly showed that there was an electrical cord in the bedroom during the last recorded assault. Karla had no explanation for that. Her timing must have been out of whack.
Rosen offered her another explanation, suggesting that Paul had left the room to put gas in the car, using a small gas tank they kept in the garage.
“He goes out of the room to get ready to take her back to Burlington, and that’s when you decided she had to die, isn’t it?” he said. All eyes turned to Karla.
“No, that’s a lie,” Karla said emphatically.
Rosen led her through the “concerns” that she might have had at the time, suggesting that Karla had just as much of a motive for murder as Paul. He cited her knowledge of the sam—
5o8 STEPHEN wiili.ms
pies her husband had given pohce years earlier when he had been questioned about the Scarborough rapes. He
queried her about the possibility that if Leslie hved she might be able to contribute to Paul’s ultimate identification.
“He’s suggesting to her that she’s the killer,” Houlahan objected, but Justice LeSage saw nothing inappropriate.
Unrelenting, Rosen continued, suggesting that Karla’s attitude toward Leslie Mahaffy had been subhuman and heartless. Rosen quoted from one of her statements to Dr. Hatcher, in which Karla discussed her state of mind before Mahaffy was killed.
“I was very upset because I didn’t want him to go to jail, because I didn’t hate him quite as much as I do now … So I didn’t really want him to go to jail and I was afraid of myself going to jail, too.”
“She was just a plaything, wasn’t she?” Rosen suggested. “She had no personality. You didn’t consider her as a real person, did you?” he asked. Then he returned to a statement Karla had made to the police under oath two years earlier.
Karla had said: “I sort of talked to LesUe through Paul. Like, I would whisper questions and, like, I was so stupid, because I never should have gotten to know Kristen, because you get emotionally involved with these people and it really hurts, it hurts a lot more, because 1 felt like 1 was friends with both of them, especially Kristen, because we did so much together.”
With total disdain, Rosen honed in on the phrase “these people,” spitting it out repeatedly while Karla tried to sidestep.
“I don’t know what problem you have with those words,” she said in a voice so quiet that Justice LeSage asked her to repeat the statement.
“You say you get emotionally … involved with ‘these people,’ ” Rosen explained, “i.e., people you bring into the house to sexually play with. That’s what you meant?”
Karla’s denial led Rosen to read each line and word again, particularly her reference to being “friends” with the dead teenagers.
“I would use the word I was friendly with them,” Karla
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suggested, leading Rosen to wonder how a friendship could exist, when LesHe presumably knew nothing about Karla, while Karla had gleaned all sorts of information about Leshe and her family and background through the furtive questions she made Paul ask as if he were some sort of giant ventriloquist’s dummy.
“You can still be friendly with someone without knowing who they are,” explained Karla, haughtily.
“Even though they’re captive in your house and forced to participate in degrading sexual activities against their consent?” an astounded Rosen responded.
“Mr. Rosen,” Karla patiently said. “You are making something out of this that isn’t there.”
Dr. Glancy told Rosen that the term battered woman’s syndrome referred to a pattern of abuse as well as the psychological consequences suffered by the battered women. As a pattern of abuse battered woman’s syndrome was a consequence of a three-phase cycle, which all the experts had accepted as characteristic of all battering relationships.
There was a tension-building phase, with verbal and minor physical abuse and attempts by the woman to prevent more severe abuse by placating the abuser.
Then there was an acute-battering phase characterized by a serious physical assault, followed by the loving-contrition phase, in which the batterer expressed remorse and tried to make amends, much as Paul Bernardo had done so effusively and pathetically on the so-called “suicide tapes.”
In abusive relationships, this cycle was then repeated, over and over again. Eventually, the woman developed a sense of helplessness about her situation—hence the term “learned helplessness.”
The woman became passive, anxious, depressed, confused, self-effacing and felt trapped in what she perceived to be a hopeless situation.
Increasingly, battered woman’s syndrome was being recognized by the courts as a legal defense in cases where a battered
woman had been charged with the murder or aggravated assault of her abuser.
There were a lot of women who were battered and abused. Women who actually suffered from battered woman’s syndrome were very rare.
There was no doubt Karla Homolka had been physically and emotionally abused by Paul Bernardo at some point. Karla might even have gone through one cycle of the abuse pattern.
Lenore Walker, a world-recognized authority in the field of battered women, had first proposed the three-phase cycle decades earlier. All subsequent clinical experience reinforced the validity of her model.
Ms. Walker insisted that a woman must go through this cycle at least twice and then remain in the abusive relationship before she could possibly be diagnosed with the syndrome. What evidence there was, along with Karla’s own statements and the substantial medical records available to the court, said that Karla had gone through the cycle only once and had then left, never to return.
There were other problems with the idea that her behavior with regard to her sister, Jane Doe, LesUe Mahaffy, Kristen French and the prostitute in Atlantic City could be explained away by battered woman’s syndrome and posttraumatic stress disorder. Her test results had not been consistent with those reported in research literature as typical of battered women suffering the syndrome.
Battered women occasionally—very occasionally—murder their abusive partners. In Angela Brown’s book, Wlien Battered Women Kill, the average age of the woman who killed her batterer was thirty-six, she had been married or living common-law for an average of 8.7 years and the vast majority—over seventy percent—had been physically abused in their early family lives.
By the time Dr. Hatcher had arrived in December, 1994, Karla had caught up with much of this information. For the first time in all her prolonged discussions with the police and her myriad doctors and therapists, Karla ironically described her father to Hatcher as “somewhat overly protective,” and shared
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the dark secret that she had been “emotionally abused—daily— while living in her father’s home.”
When Tammy Lyn was murdered, Karla was twenty years old. Karla was not married nor was she living common-law. She was living at home with her parents. There was no evidence, except in her new malingering fantasy, “recovered” just for Dr. Hatcher, that she had ever been abused—in any way by anyone—as a child.
In all the research, the vast majority of women who committed acts of violence, striking out at their abusers—not at innocent teenage bystanders—were socially isolated and had litde or no contact with family and friends. A student of the literature of abuse, Karla had tried to minimalize her rather prohfic and consistent contact with her family, friends and co-workers, but it ran contrary to her family’s, friend’s, and co-workers’ testimony.
John Rosen simply did not beheve that a woman as fastidious and concerned about apprehension as Karla Homolka would leave Kristen French’s dead body lying around the master bedroom while she and Paul went over to her parents’ house for five or six hours on Easter Sunday.
Rosen contended that Kristen had been killed when Paul Bernardo left the house to get Swiss Chalet and rent a movie on Saturday evening, rather than on Sunday before noon, as Karla had testified. Rosen challenged Karla’s contradictory statements to the police, using her May 16 statements as well as the pathologist’s report about the condition in which Kristen’s body had been found.
Karla Homolka had told John Rosen that the only beating she saw Paul Bernardo administer to Kristen were punches to her back. She had never described any severe injury to Kristen’s face and none was evident in the videos.
Rosen pointed out to Karla that she had told the poHce that Kristen had been tied to the hope chest before she was killed. In cross-examination she could even identify which of the three
false handles on the front of the chest Kristen had been tied to—the one closest to the door.
Karla had testified that about an hour after the final videotape was made, Paul had looped an electrical cord around Kristen’s neck and had sex
with her again. Then, while he questioned her about death, Karla said Paul cut Kristen off in mid-sentence and strangled her. She had told the prosecution that he held the cord taut for a full seven minutes.
This gave Rosen real pause because the pathologist had duly noted that Kristen French had aspirated blood into her lungs, which meant it had to have been inhaled through her nose or throat before she died.
“Nowhere in your evidence do you ever talk about this girl bleeding from the nose or mouth, do you?” he asked.
“I never saw her bleed from the nose or mouth,” said Karla.
“And you don’t have any evidence to give that would explain the deep subdural hemorrhages … on both sides of the head above the ears that are deep enough and hard enough that it’s something more than a fist and more like a mallet. You can’t help us with that, can you?”
Karla immediately entered her denial.
“I can’t help you with that,” she said, parroting Rosen.
Karla’s admission that she had guarded Kristen with a hard-headed rubber maUet while Kristen was bound in a closet, when Paul went to get food and rent movies on the Friday night, came back to haunt her.
Rosen had stood beside her eariier in the day, inches from her shiny blond head, and presented the mallet to her for identification. That distressed Karla, because a level of whispering rose in the pubhc gallery as her “audience” speculated on what they would do if they ever got that close to Karla with a mallet.
“And the reason you can’t help us with that,” Rosen said with full authority, “is because you’re the one who did it on Saturday afternoon while he was out and when she tried to escape, isn’t that right?”
“I have never hit anybody in my Hfe, Mr. Rosen,” Karla responded icily.
“And when he came back from that little trip with food
… she’s dead on the floor, having strangled herself against the restraint, and that’s what you told him happened. That she tried to escape and now she’s dead, isn’t that right?”
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 51
