Rosen’s theory was that after Paul left the two women alone, Kristen had begged to go to the washroom or offered some pretext to induce Karla to unbind her feet. He suggested that Kristen had seized the opportunity to attempt an escape, and had shoved Karla, who responded by attacking the tethered girl with the mallet. Then a combination of Kristen’s frantic straining against the electrical cord binding her neck and the hard blows to her head killed the girl.
No one had ever offered a more cogent explanation for how Kristen came to be so badly beaten about the face. In Rosen’s view, and the pathologist had not disagreed, the ligature marks around Kristen’s neck were inconsistent with the full-fledged strangulation described by Karla Homolka.
Dr. McAuliffe had found nine indications of probable asphyxia on Kristen’s body, including bluish fingernails, but the only thing that pointed to Hgature strangulation as the cause of her death were the dark marks on Kristen’s neck and McAuliffe could not be conclusive about them. Specific bones that were usually broken when a person was strangled were inexplicably found intact.
Rosen also noted that Dr. McAuliffe had waited fourteen months before signing Kristen’s autopsy report. It had not been signed until nine days after Karla pled guilty in July 1993. This was an unusually long time. McAuliffe lamely explained that although he had determined the cause of death almost immediately, he hesitated to sign the report because media reports had suggested that Kristen had been kept alive for almost two weeks and the police did not have a suspect until Paul Bernardo’s arrest. It was all too wishy-washy for Rosen. What did the status of a police investigation or the disposition of the media have to do with the coroner’s duties and performance?
“I wasn’t present for the whole time,” Karla offered as a possible explanation for her failure to observe any sign of facial bleeding. According to her story, she had left the room during the proceedings.
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Rosen queried her on the reason she had left. In a stunning display of sheer psychopathy, Karla told him that she had taken a shower prior to the strangulation and had left the room to blow-dry her hair.
Karla had celebrated her twenty-second birthday four days after the discovery of Kristen’s body and Rosen showed her the hand-printed card she had given her husband on that occasion: “You’re the greatest husband in the world,” she wrote. “All my love and sweet dreams of you and me together forever. Karly Curls.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Karla, admitting that she had posed happily with her mother for a photograph on that occasion. She was twenty-two plus four days when she wrote a cheery letter to her old pal Debbie Purdie, indicating that as soon as Paul finished his rap album and had a recording contract, she planned on getting pregnant.
“You could have gotten those tapes and left that marriage, isn’t that right?” Rosen asked her in his final minutes.
“First of all, I did not know there were copies of the tapes,” Karla began, suggesting that she had indeed found videotapes and taken them out of the house already, but could not be sure they were the originals. It was another bizarre response along the lines of, “She wasn’t that bad when I saw her …” It, too, went unchallenged.
Karla agreed with Rosen that survival was a “natural human instinct.” However, since she had no idea about how many copies of the tapes might have existed, she could not see it that way.
“I felt like I was in a tunnel and I could not see on either side of me,” a metaphor reminiscent of the “screaming tunnels” Carolyn MacDonald had asked her about in the summer of 1994. It was almost as evocative as Edvard Munch’s painting of the gnomish figure in Tlie Scream. “It is so difficult to explain.”
“Yes,” said Rosen citing her hundreds of lovey-dovey notes and cards, all of her letters and her mahngering conduct: “Very difficult to explain, aren’t they?”
“They’re difficult for me to make people understand,” said Karla, positively.
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“Yes,” agreed Rosen, who had a river of sweat rivulating down his back into pants loosened by the weight he had lost in just these eight days of cross-examination.
“Some people understand,” said Karla.
Bythe end of the day on July 12, Rosen had entered 177 of Karla’s love notes and greeting cards as exhibits. He had played the video of Karla’s wedding shower, the tape of the wedding reheipsal in which she had looked deeply, longingly into Paul’s eyes. Rosen had played the video showing her mother and Paul gyrating to dance music and her Hawaiian honeymoon soliloquy. Karla was intrepid.
“You’re pretty smart, aren’t you?” Rosen asked. “You are not stupid.”
“That’s very debatable,” Karla replied, pretending she was the sterotypical “dumb blonde,” even catching Rosen off guard with her flippant response. A chuckle rippled through the courtroom and Rosen shook his head, mumbUng into his white jurist’s collar.
Karla had been steadily getting stronger and more self-assured, while Rosen weakened, tiring of the futility of his circumstances. Every morning, Karla looked fresher, almost radiant, as if she were looking forward to whatever arabesques of death and despair Rosen was going to weave. Each day she was more willing than ever to verbally spar with him, a crisis junkie. By the third day, Rosen looked like a man in the midst of a mythic ordeal, one of Odysseus’s hapless boatmen as the Siren sang.
Karla Homolka was not the shghtest bit afraid. Rosen had realized that early on. What to do? Just the way she behaved on the witness stand proved every point he had tried to make.
There were profound questions about her participation in these crimes but it was her intractability that was most astounding. Karla was smart. Karla had no fear. Karla knew that the real truth was an enigma, never to be resolved in these circumstances.
The cross-examination ended without flourish. Karla was still flicking back her hair. She had good posture. Nothing in Rosen’s considerable arsenal had grazed her. He was spent,
Karla was ready to party. With a last toss of her long blond hair, Karla left the witness stand, up on the balls of her feet.
There was another explanation for Karla than the pseudo-psy-cho-compliant-battered-post-traumatically-stressed-out-other-wise-nice-girl victim the prosecution proffered. Dr. Glancy told Rosen that in his opinion, Karla was a perfect hybristophiliac.
In psychiatric hterature hybristophilia describes the phenomenon of a woman who is sexually turned on only by a partner with a history of rape and pillage. The name derives from the Greek hybridzeiii meaning “to commit an outrage.” In his book Lovemaps, the distinguished Johns Hopkins professor John Money called it “the Bonnie and Clyde syndrome.”
The old saying “behind every good man” worked just as well in reverse, in an era dominated by a new kind of “fatal woman.” There was nothing to say that a woman could not be the driving force in a hybristophilic relationship. In another variant of the syndrome, the female hybristophile taunts and provokes her lover or spouse to commit criminal acts in order to fulfil the requirements of her paraphilia.
Significantly, the hybristophilic’s “lovemap” excludes the possibihty of oneself as a victim. So long as the two partners remain bonded in their paraphilia, then each victim would always be someone else. If the ties that bound somehow unraveled—if one partner became unstable, as Paul Bernardo had— the hybristophilic partner could well become the victim. As Paul began disassembling, Karla willftilly reassembled as a battered woman. In fact, Karla was a histrionic, psychopathic hybristophile.
Karla felt as though she was going home as the authorities quickly returned her to her tiny cell in the segregation unit at Kingston’s Prison for Women. Karla would soon be eligible to apply for unescorted day passes. She would be able to go shopping in downtown Kingston or get her hair streaked, buy a pair of glasses, get new shoes, meet new friends.
Paul Bernardo did not look like the devil incarnate when he took the stand in his own defense. Neatly dressed in a dark s
uit, white shirt and a floral-patterned tie, he looked hke the boy next door. John Rosen’s examination-in-chief had been brisk and to the point. It lasted less than three hours. In his introduction, he acknowledged that there were few mysteries to the case. At least the jurors recognized, at that moment, that they were not the only ones who realized that salient fact.
“You just have to push play on that video machine and you have the whole case before you,” Rosen told the jury. “There is no doubt in the world both of them—Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo—sexually assaulted and unlawfully confined … The real question is who caused the victims’ deaths?”
During his exam-in-chief, Bernardo often regarded Rosen quizically, as though he was wondering where Rosen was taking him. Early on, Paul took an opportunity to make his own opening statement to the jury, stretching both arms toward them in a gesture that was part Praise-the-Lord evangelism, part soap salesman and part doofus.
“People,” he said, as sonorously as possible, “1 know that I’ve done some really terrible things, I know that. And I’ve caused a lot of sadness and sorrow to a lot of people, and 1 really feel sorry for that and I know I deserve to be punished, but I didn’t kill these girls.”
With minimal questioning, Rosen led Paul through each incident. With morbid attention to detail, Paul described the dismemberment of Leslie Mahafly. He told the jury the saw had repeatedly jammed in the flesh.
“Every time I had a piece done I would hand it out and Karla would reach under the tarp and take it to the bucket and take it over to the sink and lay it down,” he explained, as if he were describing a dockside fish cleaning.
Rosen had argued that both Karla and Paul had dismembered Leshe Mahafly after their parents left that Father’s Day dinner in 1991. There was no way, Rosen told the jury, that Bernardo could have dismembered, cemented and disposed of
Leslie’s body parts by himself. It was not physically possible within the two-day time frame Karla had given for those activities.
Even less plausible—unless there had been far more preparation than Karla had ever described—was the fact that there was no trace of Leslie Mahafify in the Bernardos’ basement. Bernardo concluded, “And she [Karla] would put each one in a garbage bag and those pieces were eventually placed in the root cellar” and left over night.
When It came to the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, Paul insisted that on each occasion he had left Karla alone with each girl, and when he returned, they were dead. He said he kept the videotapes because he could not bring himself to throw them out. “It was the last memory of these girls’ life and I just couldn’t do it,” he said.
When his turn came to cross-examine Paul Bernardo, prosecutor Ray Houlahan was up immediately, trying to tear a righteous strip off the man he dubbed Captain Video. His opening salvo mimicked John Rosen’s assault on Karla Homolka.
“I realize I am going to need some psychiatric help at some point,” Paul said, in all seriousness. The courtroom was suddenly alive with noisy incredulity.
“That is a face of a killer,” Houlahan declared, freezing on a video frame of Bernardo just after he had punched Kristen French.
“No, it’s not,” said Paul.
Disclaiming Karla as victim at every turn, Paul referred to a fantasy life of three-way sex in which everyone was happy.
“What’s this fantasy garbage? This is real, this is happening, isn’t it?” Houlahan snorted after Paul explained that drinking champagne out of special glasses with Leslie Mahaffy was part of his fantasy.
“Yes, sir. This fantasy had now been carried out,” Bernardo replied, cooly. Had Houlahan been paying attention, he might have caught the cliche. It barkened back to something Gordon
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Gekko, one of Paul’s heroes, had said in Wall Street: “The illusion has become real. …”
Every once in a while Paul stymied the prosecutor by astutely citing inconsistencies in statements that his ex-wife had given the police and those that she finally testified to.
“You think you’re smarter than the lawyers here?” Houlahan asked incredulously, his face flushed with anger.
“Don’t answer that,” Justice LeSage advised, and again a flutter of tittering rippled over the courtroom.
Houlahan got totally lost in what seemed an infinite galaxy of irrelevant trivia. Paul Bernardo was enjoying his time in the spotlight; once again he got to review his trophies in minute detail. His testimony was awash with inanities.
“You’re right-handed, aren’t you?” Houlahan asked, showing Paul one of the sixteen pornographic Polaroids he had taken in the summer of 1988, this one where he was entering Karla from behind, holding a cord around her neck and a knife to her throat with his right hand.
“I’m ambidextrous,” Paul repHed.
“Which hand do you write with?” Houlahan asked.
“My right hand,” Paul replied, “but I throw with my left.”
Although he had only recently learned to pronounce the word anal correctly—throughout the trial Houlahan said “an-nal”—the prosecutor dwelt on the topic exhaustively. After reviewing the video involving Jane Doe, Paul rejected Houlahan’s accusations.
“Here we see that part of your … cleanup of Jane Doe in the area of her anus, right?”
“Yes sir, I was wiping blood from her hymen that was in that area,” Paul said, describing the graphic trophy, which Houlahan had now replayed another four or five times.
“You appear to be wiping blood fi-om her anus, according to this,” Houlahan observed.
“The anus and the vagina, sir, are closely situated,” came the reply.
Then Houlahan replayed the videotape again.
“You want to see it again?” he asked.
“Sure,” Paul responded.
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As the cross-examinarion plodded along, Houlahan grew increasingly impatient with his implacable witness. He called the answers he was getting “blarney,” and wearied of the accused calling him “sir.”
“What’s this ‘yes sir,’ ‘no sir,’ three bags full, sir? That’s not the real you, is it?” Houlahan demanded. It almost seemed like a spontaneous outburst, a break from the litany of prepared questions Houlahan kept before him. Nothing, however, was too far off the cuff with Houlahan. He had borrowed the observation from one of the media with whom he had spoken earher in the day and worked it in to his barrage.
Houlahan was unflappable, in spite of the fact that almost nothing he asked was relevant to the object of his prosecution.
The washing of Kristen French’s body in the Jacuzzi following her death had always posed unsavor)^ questions. Houlahan used this incident, which Paul and Karla both agreed had taken place, to try and show that Paul—and Karla—had committed premeditated murder, because Karla had testified they purchased a commercial douche solution in advance, anticipating their need to destroy any forensic evidence in the anal and vaginal cavities of their victim.
Paul countered with the bizarre image of them using a plastic beer-drinking funnel he had purchased during one of his innumerable trips to Florida to celebrate spring.
“That holds about twenty-four ounces,” Paul explained. “And it was done at least twice per cavity.”
Houlahan’s cross of Paul Bernardo lasted an interminable six days. During the confrontation, many admissions were made, including Paul’s own assessment of himself as a “jerk.” The only possible explanation for Houlahan’s inane persistence would be the prosecutor’s fantasy that he could ehcit a confession from the accused. But Paul Bernardo was so obviously guilty of all the charges that it had made the past three months and three weeks of trial a farce. The irrelevant confession—that is, that he, Paul Bernardo, had actually strangled both girls with a black electrical cord—was not forthcoming. Paul Bernardo admitted his guilt. He did everything else they had said he did. But according to him, the two girls had not died the way Karla
Homolka said they did, and there was no evidence to show that they had.
Thus Canadians wiled away the Summer of 1995, watching the OJ. Simpson trial on television and reading, riveted, the garrulous daily reports served up by a self-censoring media about the seemingly endless pornographic revelations at Paul Bernardo’s trial.
Celebrity trials about domestic abuse and passion-driven spousal murders were hardly comparable to trials that dealt with the serial crimes of sexual sadists and psychopaths.
There were two similarities: in both cases only a dog and the killers knew the real truth about who had actually murdered the victims. In Simpson’s case, it was his dead wife’s white Akita, Kato; in Bernardo’s, Buddy the Rottweiler.
The other similarity was an irrefutable sense that police bungling and incompetence had set two murderers free.
Ray Houlahan instructed the jury to forget about Karla Homolka—they did not need Karla to fmd Paul Bernardo guilty on all counts.
The jurors looked bewildered. What had the last four months been all about? If they did not need her, why did they have her?
Rosen made an impassioned plea to the jury, full of reason and rhetorical flourishes, but his passion was misspent and imprecations futile. His cHent was what his client was. Seeing was believing. Ultimately, no one has any sympathy for the devil— or for his advocate.
Juries in Canada are seldom, if ever, sequestered—except when they deliberate. Since it was late in the day, the jurors decided to partake of the free hotel dinner and accommodation that had been prearranged. But that was it.
It was the Thursday evening before the long Labor Day
weekend—traditionally the last holiday weekend of the summer—and enough time had been vaporized by this sonorous, lugubrious, pornographic prosecution.
The eight men and four women who had served as a jury of Bernardo’s peers had been forced to sit through four months, when a week would have sufficed. At around noon on Friday they found Paul Bernardo guilty as charged on all nine counts.
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