When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  In Avella, Pennsylvania, a nineteen-year-old college student home for the holidays set her house on fire, killing her father and seriously injuring her mother. Melanie Vicheck was charged with murder and arson.

  In New Orleans, twenty-three-year-old Consuella Monique Gaines-Thomas sprung her boyfriend from custody by threatening his guards with a shotgun on the courthouse steps, then carjacked a Cadillac from two elderly women and drove with her boyfriend to the Georgia coast.

  In Baltimore, Renee Aulton, twenty-six, was charged with arson and murder in the deaths of her children, Christina, four, and Natalie, two. She had flicked a burning cigarette inside the bedroom closet of her home, left her two girls inside, and gone down to the street to watch the flames consume them.

  That same week, in November 1994, three South Florida women carjacked a Toyota on 1-95 and assaulted its driver with knives. A young woman in Edmonton, Alberta, was declared a dangerous offender after multiple knife assaults on prostitutes. In Virginia, a beauty queen named Traci Lippard broke into the home of her rival and attacked the girl’s father with a hammer.

  These, of course, were the headline grabbers, revealing little about the other eighty-seven thousand women arrested for violent crimes in 1994, who were also up to something complicated, idiosyncratic, and human. Some of the violence was conventional and domestic, some of it more public, more recognizably “male.” The picture of female violence is a rich and textured tableau that we present to ourselves as monchromatic and stilted. To some, the subject of women’s aggression is too threatening. To others, the subject is too trivial, destined only for the True Crime shelves. To others, most notably the academics who define the terms and interpret the data, it’s too alarmingly “anti-feminist” to even suggest. Yet, we must suggest it.

  Violent crime rates by women have risen at the end of this century. Arrests for aggravated assault climbed from sixteen women per 100,000 in 1960 to fifty by 1992; arrests for robbery quadrupled; the homicide rate increased by a third. Female violent-crime arrests overall grew at more than twice the pace of men’s. The cultural shape of aggression, moreover, is rapidly becoming apparent in the shift in behavior for young women, of a new generation, who are the fastest-growing group of violent offenders on the continent. Between 1960 and 1990, the aggravated assault and robbery arrests for girls increased tenfold, more than twice the increase for boys, and both rates soared relative to the actual population. Girls’ felony arrest rates jumped 124 percent from 1986 to 1995. In Canada, young women now account for 24 percent of all violent offenses in their age group; in the United States, it is 18 percent. At the same time, suicide rates by teenaged girls have dropped—by 50 percent since 1970.

  Clearly, it’s high time we provided shade and nuance to the picture. Not only because it makes no sense to talk of all these women as innocent or to pretend that family violence is not, somehow, the responsibility of fully half of its perpetrators. But because if we concede that women are ambitious, like men, and possess a will to power as men do, then we need to concede that women, like men, are capable of injuring others who thwart them. We cannot insist on the strength and competence of women in all the traditional masculine arenas yet continue to exonerate ourselves from the consequences of power by arguing that, where the course of it runs more darkly, we are actually power less. This has become an awkward paradox in feminist argument. How do we argue that we can be aggressive on every front—the Persian Gulf, the urban police beat, the empires of business, sports, hunting, politics, debate—but never in a manner that does harm? How do we affirm ourselves to be as complex, desirous, and independent as men without conceding the antisocial potential in those qualities? And what does Toni Cato become if we insist that women are nonviolent players? She becomes Jezebel thrown to the dogs, to be labeled as people see fit and know how, as an unimportant, two-timing whore. Anthony Riggs was emblematic, first of “any soldier,” valiant and brave, then of any African-American man, struggling to regain dignity and a rightful place. His wife is a nonwoman, irrelevant, a slut.

  MAYBE YOU MISTOOK ME FOR AN ANGEL

  Perceptions of Female Violence & the Vocabulary of Motive

  Messire, I am but a poor village girl. I cannot ride on horseback nor lead men to violence.

  JOAN OF ARC, fifteenth century

  If I need to understand what I am doing, if I cannot act without my own approbation … then I will invent a morality that condones me. Though by doing so, I risk condemning all that I have been.

  MARGARET DRABBLE, THE WATERFALL, 1969

  Sometimes, the truths that we hold to be fixed in our culture develop a fissure, which widens into a crack, and as we watch, the mirror shatters shard by shard, until nothing is left but fragments of prejudice lying in disarray at our feet. This happened to a family, a community, and a nation when a young woman named Karla Homolka walked out of her marital home in Saint Catharines, Ontario, in the bitter midwinter of 1993, her eyes black and her legs bruised, and went home with her upset parents and, at their urging, called the police.

  Saint Catharines is not like Detroit. It is a small, bland, conservative city with a tidy downtown. There are few guns. The crime rate is low. Nothing in the landscape resembles a “combat zone.” The only war that rages in Saint Catharines is the one that happens everywhere, the one that leapt to mind when the police fielded Karla Homolka’s call and made their way to the pretty suburb where she’d lived along Lake Ontario’s frozen shore. Another victim of domestic violence. Two cops shook their heads as they slowed their cruiser on a silent, snow-banked street. They knocked on the door of a pink, Cape Cod-style home, stamping their feet in the cold, and after a moment Paul Bernardo, twenty-eight, preppy-handsome in a collegiate sweater, his hair, like his wife’s, dyed Florida blond, ushered them in politely.

  Paul Bernardo was a courteous young man, the son of a prominent Ontario family. Above him on his living room wall was a photograph of his wedding: he and Karla on June 29, 1992, radiant, the groom in an expensive tuxedo, the gorgeous bride in white, both of them well-fed and cared-for and smiling.

  Now, the picture-perfect wife had an awfully ugly tear. “You’re under arrest for assault with a weapon,” the officers told Paul. “A flashlight,” she’d explained. Paul went along to the station, calm, as if running an errand. He paid his bail, he went back home. The next afternoon, he changed his locks.

  Valentine’s Day came and went, and no word passed between the couple; their affair was over as fast as it had begun. They’d met in a hotel restaurant when she was seventeen, he, twenty-two, and within hours made love, exhilarated, in full view of the two friends who would become best man and maid of honor at their wedding. He was a young business student, she’d taken a year off from high school to work. They were both headstrong and sexy, intelligent, hungry to take on the world. For the next three years, Paul courted Karla longdistance from Toronto, while she lived at home with her family and aced her way through school. Then they married, throwing an extravagant bash, and settled in Saint Catharines in a house they could barely afford. Appearances, appearances. Look smart, dress sharp, party hard.

  Karla Homolka’s mother, Dorothy, could not fathom what had happened when she pulled her battered daughter out. She’d seen Karla every week of her marriage; the couple was always over, swimming in their pool, arranging games and parties, hosting barbecues. Karla had a comic genius—she did imitations, her best being Edith Bunker from “All in the Family.” Paul was witty and high-spirited. The Homolkas had never seen Karla despondent or injured, and then she’d been horribly assaulted. Dorothy Homolka saw her daughter’s face that day and “almost had a heart attack.”

  And that was it. It was over. Except that the story had not yet begun.

  On February 16, two officers from the metro Toronto sexual vice squad called Karla Homolka at her aunt and uncle’s condo in Brampton, a Westchester-style bedroom community north of Toronto, where she’d gone to escape Paul. Not that he’d pursued her. But, her family
had reasoned, abusive men stalk. Karla was safe in Brampton. She was even having fun there—rebounding swiftly from her trauma. Shopping, out to parties, having a fling with a fellow she met in a nightclub.

  The vice squad officers had some news. DNA results had come in from the Centre for Forensic Sciences in downtown Toronto. Paul Bernardo appeared to match the genetic fingerprint left behind on the victims of the Scarborough Rapist. This had to be astonishing news. Everyone in Ontario knew the specter of that rapist. A composite sketch of his face rode on buses and subways throughout the 1980s. Like Seattle’s Green River killer, he struck repeatedly in the same suburb of metro Toronto, eluding detection for years. Nineteen women raped at knifepoint, many wounded, some mutilated. Wraith-like, he had haunted the streets where Paul had been living, before he moved to Saint Catharines to marry Karla.

  In the days that followed this stunning revelation, the Ontario press would report that twenty-one-year-old Karla Homolka, a battered wife, was assisting the police by searching her memory in quest of clues to her husband’s nocturnal movements. She couldn’t know much, could she, because during the time the rapist struck she was living at home with her parents in Saint Catharines. Nevertheless, media columnists debated the matter of compelled spousal testimony: Was it legal? Would she be able to provide evidence if it was? “Wife a Victim, Too,” ran the Toronto Star headline on February 22, five days after Paul’s arrest. “You know who I really feel sorry for?” a Saint Catharines woman told the Star. “It’s Karla.” Imagine being married to a rapist. “She’s a victim,” agreed her boss, David Wade, a veterinarian for whom Karla was a full-time assistant. “She can come back to the clinic any time.” At Dorothy Homolka’s workplace, administrators brought in a battered-woman’s expert to help employees understand what their colleague and her daughter went through.

  In fact, Karla was refusing to cooperate with the police. She’d retained a lawyer. She had reason to believe that investigators were making a connection between the Scarborough rapes and another set of crimes. In 1991 and 1992, the abduction and demise of two high school girls had gripped the towns and small cities of southern Ontario. The girls were loved and deeply mourned. There was speculation that a serial killer was loose. Citizens told reporters how frightened they felt. Acting on a tip, one of thousands they were sifting through, two Niagara region police officers had interviewed Paul Bernardo in May of 1992. But Bernardo hadn’t struck them as a likely suspect. If everyone in Detroit assumed that a black man had murdered Specialist Riggs, nobody thought an affable, well-mannered, married accountant sitting comfortably on his sleek white couch in a fancy Saint Catharines neighborhood could even write bad checks. The investigators looked around, lost interest, and left.

  Now, however, assumptions had radically shifted.

  If Bernardo was capable of wife assault and serial rape, he was probably capable of murder. Knowing that investigators would question her about it, Homolka confided to her aunt that she was “in serious trouble.” Her aunt passed this information on to the police, and they recognized it triumphantly as the break they had been waiting for. They finally seemed to have a witness to a pair of unsolvable slayings. The sadistic bastard’s wife could link him to the crimes. It was wonderful news. In short order, the Niagara region crown attorney signaled Homolka’s lawyer that they wanted to offer a deal. Whatever her story was—for she’d not said a word—they’d ensure she receive gentle treatment if she agreed to testify against her husband. “We’re not here to get you, we need you to get him,” a Niagara region investigator told Homolka as the attorneys negotiated. “You’re innocent. You’re the victim.”

  What could they, or anybody else, otherwise believe? Within our culture, we are not taught to view well-mannered, pretty young women as possible criminals. Certainly, we are unable to see a woman who has been battered, if only once by her husband, as having ever been his equal in harming someone else. We may not hesitate to arrest a fourteen-year-old male gang member from Detroit, even if he’s been beaten, cut up, shot at by others. We’ll even arrest a ten-year-old boy who’s worked in tandem with another child, as in the infamous British murder of the toddler James Bulger in 1993. But a woman who has been hit, a good woman, good-looking, white, middle class, cannot possibly be culpable in her own right. Police officers have been found to identify female offenders “with their mothers, sisters, or daughters,” according to one law enforcement study, and to feel “reluctant” to arrest them. Women of all races are the least likely offenders to be processed beyond the arrest stage.

  “Women will try to use their femininity,” says retired Los Angeles Police Department robbery-homicide detective Leroy Orozco. “ ‘Look at me, I’m so small.’ Yeah, but you got a big gun. A woman will try to use that on you.” Of course they will, because it works. Not until her lawyer had clinched Homolka’s deal, a ten-year sentence for manslaughter, with parole after six, did anyone even arrest her. From mid-February until May 18, 1993, Karla Homolka was free to play the public role of Paul Bernardo’s wounded wife, mystified and saddened. The police did not even tell the media that she was a suspect in the crimes.

  Once in custody, Homolka mistakenly believed that the police had found the videotapes she and Paul had made of their crimes. Although, at first, she’d removed herself entirely from the killings, saying that he’d only told her about them, then conceded she’d been a witness to them, she now decided to confess to far more than her interrogators expected. Why not, after all? She had secured immunity from all further charges as part of her deal. In a series of interviews during the summer of 1993, Homolka told a horrifying tale.

  Her account began with December 1990, because that’s where she had to begin, to explain the videotapes. On Christmas Eve, Karla Homolka’s sister, Tammy Lynn, fifteen years old, had been in the basement of the Homolka family rec room in the company of Paul and Karla, watching a video. She drank too much champagne, passed out, and choked on her vomit. That had been Paul and Karla’s official story, long accepted by the family. But now, Homolka revealed a different scenario. Confirmed upon exhumation of the corpse: Homolka had offered her sister to her sweetheart, drugged. Having learned from David Wade how to administer animal anesthetic, she had used her skill to douse her sister with toxic amounts of Halothane and the sedative Halcion, after which she and Paul had raped her.

  Karla Homolka explained that she’d been a battered woman. She didn’t intend for her sister to die, she said, but she had to rape her. She was under Paul’s control: abused by him, threatened, coerced. When everything went wrong, disastrously and tragically, and Tammy Lynn Homolka was buried in the ground, Karla found herself trapped. Paul had a secret with which he could blackmail her. She had to move in with her monster. She had to marry him. She had to help him abduct, rape, and murder.

  The rest of the story unfolded like this.

  Mid-June 1991, Karla was frantic with last-minute details for her wedding. She and Paul would be the figures atop their white cake. A morning suit, a southern belle gown, pheasant for dinner, and a horse-drawn carriage to whisk them away. Lying awake at night, going over details: What’s done? What’s left? Did I make the right decision about shoes?

  Countdown to the wedding. Relatives shop for gifts. Karla and Paul say, “Money! We just want money!” They throw a Stag and Doe party and get loaded down with yuppie goods, with patio furniture and a barbecue and bottles of Scotch and peach schnapps.

  In the nearby town of Burlington, volunteers comb fields and streams for a sign of Leslie Mahaffy, last seen late at night outside her house. Unable to get in, she’d walked to the 7-Eleven and phoned her best friend, looking for a place to crash so she wouldn’t have to wake up her parents and admit she’d missed her curfew. Then she had vanished.

  June 29, the day breaks fine, the wish of every bride. Karla slips on the taffeta dress she bought across the border in Buffalo after obsessing for months in her wedding planner about where to buy the perfect gown. She teases her hair. She bosses h
er bridesmaids around.

  Michael Doucette, out fishing with his little boy a few miles from the wedding ceremony, wades past a cracked cement block and finds within it a severed thigh.

  Leslie Mahaffy had braces and a brand-new boyfriend, she was funky and smart and a bit rebellious, but she had no idea how normal, how just like her, a predator could look. Paul chatted her up, she asked him for a cigarette, he kidnapped her off her front lawn. She lived in the pink Cape Cod house for twenty-four hours, raped repeatedly by both Paul and Karla. The jury at Paul’s trial would view the scene on the video that surfaced after Homolka made her deal. Spectators in the courtroom heard the audio portion: a radio in the white carpeted master bedroom plays “I Am Superman” by R.E.M. above the murmurs of a man and a woman and the rise and fall of a girl’s voice, wailing.

  Late the second night, Leslie Mahaffy was killed. The next day, Karla entertained her parents for lunch.

  Kristen French, abducted in daylight outside her high school the following April, was kept alive for Easter weekend. She was dark-haired, sixteen years old, beautiful, and frank, her face, in the newspaper photos, filled with intelligence—everyone in Ontario followed her vanishing and hoped she’d come out alive. Witnesses had seen “two men” pull her into a cream-colored car. Reporters gave up-to-the-minute news. There was no break in the case for fourteen days. Then French was found in a ditch near Leslie Mahaffy’s grave. She was naked, curled up as if asleep. Her long hair had been shorn, her body bleached of hair, to erase all trace of fibers. There were ligature marks on her neck. She seemed to have been strangled.

  She was strangled, Homolka now said. Paul did it, at her urging, because she had to go to her parents’ home for Easter dinner. They could no longer have this captive in their house. Questions abounded in shocked minds. Why had witnesses seen “two men” abduct Kristen French? They must have filled in the picture the way they imagined it had to be. It was Homolka undisguised—deliberately, unthreateningly female—who’d called French over to the car. If the investigators were thrown by the idea that all this time, for over a year, they’d been chasing down every lead that involved two men, they were not about to leap to the other end of the spectrum of possibility and see this as two people, male and female, equal partners in a crime. What Karla Homolka was telling them could translate into only one language: that of the present day, the ideology of masculine dominance and feminine submission. If she was involved in these horror stories, it could only have been because she—fair-haired, beautiful, and black-eyed—had no choice.