When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  In 1966, Myra and Ian stood trial together. They remained unmoved and wouldn’t admit for years to come that they had done what they’d done. To their way of thinking, it was nobody’s business. Yet the courtroom was wrenched apart by the recording of Lesley Ann Downey’s screams. It was an event that traumatized Britain, as the videotapes made by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka would traumatize Canada thirty years later. Eventually, it emerged that Ian Brady was insane. Indeed, the evidence suggests that his schizophrenia came on at the outset of their murder spree. He believed he was receiving orders to kill from the Germans. It was Hindley who saw their killing as a means to bind them together as outlaws. So caught up was she in their private waltz that she failed to recognize Brady’s madness. She also failed to grasp how Manchester felt, gazing upward to the moors. The day citizens were searching for bodies in the shifting peat, she boiled in rage when the bobbies accidentally ran over her dog, Puppet. “You’re nothing but common murderers,” she cried.

  “In 1967 I was growing up in London, just after the trial,” wrote the poet Diana Fitzgerald Bryden. “I was very young, so my understanding of the ‘moors murders’ was cloudy and nightmarish and full of half-truths—an atmosphere exacerbated by threats that Myra Hindley would come and get me when I was bad.” Hindley sank into the British psyche as a “Medusa-faced” monster. She was evil. She was not considered, as Karla Homolka was, a coerced or battered woman. No such script existed in the early sixties. Yet both women, however they accounted for themselves, claimed a powerful hold on the imagination. A critical difference exists between how we respond to violent women when they are partners in crime and our response when they are serial killers. Unlike Puente, team offenders like Hindley, Homolka, Bonnie Parker, Patty Hearst, and the Manson girls retain our interest for decades. One reason has to do with the partnered criminal’s choice of victims. Women who kill or rob with men are much more likely to go after traditionally masculine targets—our children, rather than their own, or young women and men in their prime: the people whom society cherishes most. Another reason seems to be the very fact that they act as part of a team. If we cannot conceive of women as predators and so erase from our minds the likes of Puente, we can conceive of the corrupting power of love.

  In literature and myth, destructive duets are often cast as a replay of Adam and Eve, equating female ambition with the moral destruction of men. Historically, the equation reverses itself when we consider partners in crime: The woman in a criminal team is held up as love’s dupe, an infatuated Bonnie simpering after glamorous Clyde. When that famous couple met their end along the Texas-Louisiana border in 1934, The New York Times ran the headline: “Barrow and woman slain in Louisiana trap!” Bonnie Parker wasn’t even worthy of a name. In 1991, U.S. District Judge A. Andrew Hauk scheduled a hearing to determine whether an armed robber in Oakland, California, named Danielle Mast had acted under the “Svengali influence” of her boyfriend, even though the police had no evidence that he was involved in her five bank robberies. Judge Hauk reasoned that women are “soft touches” for clever men, “particularly if sex is involved.” Carol Bundy, a highly intelligent and remorseless psychopath who shot prostitutes with her boyfriend Doug Clark, was “a woman who would do anything for love,” according to the dust jacket on her true crime biography. Charlene Gallego “just wanted to be loved,” proclaimed a headline in Sacramento magazine, in an article detailing her involvement in ten murders with her common-law husband, Gerald, in the late 1970s.

  Is violent crime, for women, reducible to love? Are women focused so naively and narrowly on the hearts of men that they follow them to hell without reflection like dopey, affectionate dogs? The only advance made on this argument recently has been to say: No, women aren’t just in love—they’re coerced. Karla Homolka, according to Susan G. Cole in Toronto’s Now magazine, was a “brutalized” victim who “chose the most humane course she could” by drugging her sister so that Tammy would at least be unconscious when Bernardo raped her. Myra Hindley, according to Lord Astor, who made a bid for her parole in 1993, is “a victim: a normal human being who has been through hell.” The academic discourse has been equally reductive of women’s agency. Virtually the only contributor to the case literature is the FBI’s Behavioral Science Services Unit. Famous for their intricate psychological profiles of male serial killers, they offer only one category for female perpetrators: “compliant victims,” by which they mean that women like Hindley and Homolka—strong-willed, charismatic, nonconformist—are really just bendable creatures, easily bullied into doing one man’s bidding.

  No official tally of dual perpetraters in violent crime exists, but women clearly aren’t strangers to predatory teamwork. When Carol Bundy was negotiating a plea-bargain agreement in return for testimony against Doug Clark, she found herself in a jail cell next to Veronica Compton, girlfriend of a Los Angeles serial killer named Kenneth Bianchi, known as the Hillside Strangler. Compton had attempted a copycat strangling to throw the cops off Bianchi’s trail. Along down the row were other partners in crime, prompting Carol to marvel in a letter, “Women like us aren’t as rare as we thought.” Indeed, one serial murder sample analyzed by Eric Hickey found that 38 percent involved one or more women. A random sample of recent cases gives one a sense of the scope.

  Rosemary West was convicted in November 1995 in Gloucester, England, of ten murders committed with her husband, Frederick. Judith Ann Neelly is on death row in Alabama for six slain victims she sexually assaulted and attacked in the early 1980s with her husband, Alvin. Charlene Gallego was sentenced to sixteen years in 1982 for the ten murders she committed in Sacramento with Gerald. Cynthia Lynn Coffman went to death row in California in 1992 for abducting and strangling two young women with her lover, James Gregory Marlow. In Lexington, Kentucky, the lovers Tina Powell and Lafonda Foster went on a twenty-four-hour rampage in 1986 that left five people shot, stabbed, burned, run over with a vehicle, and mutilated. Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine Wood, nurses and lovers at the Alpine Manor Nursing Home in Walker, Michigan, suffocated six patients in 1988. Alton Coleman and Debra Brown committed eight particularly savage murders in Illinois in 1984. Said Brown of one of their victims: “I killed the bitch and I don’t give a damn. I had fun out of it.”

  In Florida in 1989, a two-bit hustler named Kosta Fotopoulos acted as cameraman while his girlfriend, Diedre Hunt, pumped four bullets into the body of an acquaintance, Mark Ramsey. Hunt then recruited a hit man to shoot Fotopoulos’s wife, Lisa; the hit man was knocked off in turn by the couple. Hunt’s “kill or be killed” defense was belied by the video evidence, which documented an eerie look of exaltation on her face.

  From teenage girls engaging in robbery and assault in pairs or gangs, to lovers on a cross-country hold-up spree, to sexual assaults upon children, partnered offending is possibly the most common way for women in our society to commit public and so-called masculine violence. The extremely violent man needs no approving witness to commit aggressive acts. A woman, on the other hand, if she is not as purely psychopathic as Marybeth Tinning or Dorothea Puente, is in an entirely different position. If she wants to transgress expectations of her sex with masculine forms of aggression, she needs a kind of permission. The process is psychological, one of gaining a sense of entitlement to act out forbidden ambitions. “Learning crime,” as Allison Morris points out, “includes not only techniques but also rationalizations, justifications and attitudes.” Women in other societies, in Somalia and Rwanda, or Aboriginal Australia, are entitled by their culture to pick up weapons and use them. African-American women are more entitled than white women to throw punches or to get involved, as Toni Cato did, in crime-as-business. White women, however, are more likely to require mentors and co-conspirators. As often as not, they look for validation to men, usually romantic partners. A particularly compelling example of this transition through men is the case of Karla Faye Tucker, whose story has been beautifully described by the writer Beverly Lowry. Tucker was a spry Texan te
enager, eyes bright, spirits quick, who lived in a suburb of Houston, where older men—biker types, Vietnam vets—escorted her to Aerosmith concerts and back to ranch-style condos. She was a tomboy, attracted to men who could teach her to fight. She was fond of vodka, drugs, and of showing any guy who chose to see that he’d met his match in her. She was small, but she had a spitfire temper, the kind that invites men to say, “You’re so cute when you’re angry,” until they get slammed in the face. In 1983, Tucker was dating a combat veteran who’d been teaching her paramilitary maneuvers. One night, wired on speed, Karla Faye hauled on her boyfriend’s hand and jumped into his Ranchero, parked in the drive. They were “overamped,” her boyfriend conceded later. Karla Faye wanted to break into the house of one Jerry Lynn Dean, a guy she’d been feuding with for a couple of years. The idea she had was to steal his Harley. Or maybe not even. Maybe just check things out in a “reconnaissance mission,” like soldiers under cover of night.

  Creeping around in the shadowy house, Karla Faye found Jerry Dean slowly waking to strange sounds. He lay on his back, on a futon. She straddled his chest like a rodeo queen. His fear made her rush. She reached out across the floor and grabbed a pickax to hold to his throat. He began to struggle, she began to slam. Bucking and speeding on her bronco, eleven stab wounds to the chest and throat, an orgasm. “I popped a nut,” she later bragged to her sister. Her sister turned her and her boyfriend, Danny Garrett, in to the police, leaving the city of Houston to struggle with a picture that didn’t make sense. Tucker was possessed of a fawnlike beauty, but she refused to trade on her image. She didn’t project the aura of an innocent the way Karla Homolka did. She was obviously strong, genuinely likable, candid, and willing to take responsibility. “I know I’ve done this thing,” she said, “but I don’t know what I’ve done.” The statement was apt. No script had yet been written for a woman like Tucker. No one could remember a woman—certainly not such a pretty woman—killing without motive and being sexually aroused. What was equally perplexing was that her murdering had no connection to being battered, or coerced, or blindly loving the man she was with. Failing to find the script that might somehow exonerate her or at least mitigate her actions, Houston fell back on a stereotype of “vengeful whore.” She and her boyfriend were sent to death row.

  The very opposite stereotype, that of pliant virgin, came into play in Karla Homolka’s case, though sex was a feature in both crimes. Understanding how the community conceived of Homolka so archetypically wasn’t difficult. The hard part was trying to get at some semblance of the truth. One had to seek the story between the lines, listening to what she didn’t say, hearing from those witnesses who knew her, watching for a truer history to unfold.

  On May 29, 1995, Karla Homolka’s mother, Dorothy, took the stand at Paul Bernardo’s trial. Her voice was high and small, held in like a girl’s, but her demeanor was that of a determined woman who’d been through hell without melting. Detachment was her survival technique: passivity forged by a powerful will. She responded to all the questions posed to her, defense or prosecution, without alliance, readily agreeing that her daughter had a “glow” throughout her affair with Bernardo. Her household was a fun-loving and rather permissive place, she agreed: drinks and pool parties for the girls, a stream of friends in and out, long lunches on Sundays, which continued weekly after Karla got married. The parents evidently preferred that their daughters, whom they’d raised on Dundonald Street in Saint Catharines since 1974, grow up in front of them, not behind their backs. “More often than not,” Karla said, “our friends would come to our house.” Karla’s first invitation to Paul Bernardo was, in fact, to come to her house. Within months, Dorothy Homolka and her husband, Karel, a lighting technician, invited the young suitor to sleep on their couch on the weekends so that he didn’t have to drive back to his home in Scarborough. By 1990, Bernardo had launched a kind of home invasion, documenting all family frolics with his ever-present camera.

  In the video shot the night that Tammy died, the teenagers career about with tropical cocktails in hand, and they are clearly the masters of this multilevel, semi-detached universe. Giggling, they zoom in on Dorothy as she bakes in her small kitchen. “Extreme close-up, Mom, do it!” Karla bosses through laughter. Then they tumble downstairs to the shag-rugged rec room, disturbing Karel Homolka as he naps on the couch. He lifts his mild face to them, smiling and blinking. The family’s embrace of itself is so tight that one senses how it might have been stifling before Paul came along, the nascent identities of the three girls blurring. Karla, twice displaced by younger sisters, demanded more singular attention. From an early age, her involvement in school was audience-oriented: figure skating, choir, musicals, variety shows, the dance club. She wrote poetry and short stories, and came to love romance novels. In high school, she dressed for attention: multihued hair, miniskirts, jewelry. She bought bridal magazines, fantasizing about the ultimate vanity trip: a woman’s “special day.” Not that she wanted to be a homemaker. She wanted to be a cop, and wore a pair of handcuffs on her jean jacket as a statement of intent. Homolka was hip to the power to command notice, whatever technique worked, being a bride, being a cop.

  At seventeen, she discovered the power of sex appeal. She quit school, went on the pill, and flew off in defiance of her parents’ wishes to Manhattan, Kansas, for a two-week rendezvous with an American boy. Three months later, in October 1987, she met Paul Bernardo. If anyone could make Homolka stand out from her sisters on Dundonald Street, it was Bernardo, which may have been precisely his allure. They quickly began having sex in her bedroom off the basement rec room, where her parents watched TV. “I love fucking you with my parents in the house,” she raved to her lover in a letter. Soon, their sex included his and her handcuffs, and a dog collar she brought home from the pet store, which he pulled daringly tight around her neck. “I was very physically attracted to him,” she would say. “He’s got this magnetism.… It’s his personality. He’s very charming.” Paul said, “I thought she was really strong-willed and independent and a little weird.” She was impulsive, he meant, and sexually unabashed.

  She let him take a series of mock-violent fetish shots with a Polaroid, explaining later, “It was important to him, not to me.” She stopped wearing miniskirts and fraternizing with boys in her high school; shrugging, she said, “It wasn’t that important to me.” Ray Houlahan elicited these facts as proof of Karla’s physical and sexual abuse. For many people following the case, that was balderdash. Karla permitted Paul’s experiments because she was getting what she wanted in return. Bernardo was her perfect subterfuge. On the outside he was everything her parents could want for their dutiful eldest daughter. Privately, he was sexy, lustful, and even a little bit scary, a radical engine for teenage rebellion.

  In an FBI survey of seven women who got involved in the crimes of husbands or lovers who were “sexual sadists,” researchers noted that, in addition to being uniformly better educated and intelligent than their men, “the women all ‘fell’ for the men relatively quickly, even though they recognized a sinister side to them.” This curious fact was not addressed in the researchers’ final analysis. The dynamic was summed up as straightforward male coercion—a process of molding “sexually naive” girls into “compliant victims” through “positive reinforcement (for example, gratitude, compliments, or attention) or negative reinforcement (pouting, ignoring, or rejection) to obtain her compliance for progressively deviant activities.”

  The FBI paradigm assumes that a woman’s stake in deviant behavior can never be self-interest. One could not begin to apply this analysis to the case of Carol Bundy, who teamed up with her sexual sadist in the late 1970s and was ultimately far more articulate about what had happened than either Karla Homolka or the experts. A divorced Valley housewife living in North Hollywood, Bundy met Doug Clark, the degenerate son of a U.S. steel company executive, at The Little Nashville club in 1978. They instantly glimpsed a common bond, which was that they were both sociopathic pseudoint
ellectuals brimming with disdain for the rat race, looking for shortcuts to self-indulgence and dissolution. Well-read, urbane, capable of doing anything they wanted, they delighted, instead, in a mutual venality. At Carol’s apartment off Van Nuys Boulevard, near a strip club called The Classy Lady, they got involved in increasingly perverse behavior.

  Unlike Hindley and Homolka, both of whom were younger, Bundy made no effort to beautify herself or be sexy. “Carol had big, thick glasses; heavyset, she was a two o’clock tan in a beer bar,” says retired detective Leroy Orozco, who investigated the case. “[But] she was flamboyant, very outward, she didn’t hide anything.” Carol had been an exhibitionist as a teenager, and a peeping Tom—to all intents and purposes, a burgeoning sex offender. Although married for a time to the father of her two children, she kept up a stream of lovers, continuing to see some of them while she dated Clark. She was hardly a “sexually naive girl.” Of her sex life with Doug Clark she would say, “He was playing to my fantasies as opposed to me playing to his.”

  Over time, as with Hindley and Brady, their fantasies began to merge, becoming one shared daydream of immutable outlaw power. They cruised Sunset Boulevard in Carol’s beat-up Toyota, looking for prostitutes to assault as a prelude to sex. Eventually, the assaults escalated to homicide, with Bundy slowly shifting from backseat observer to shooter. Within a year they’d killed seven women, beheading one, whose beauty Carol then ghoulishly disfigured with her makeup. Ultimately, two Santa Monica teenagers who’d been hitchhiking fell into their clutches, and the girls’ disappearance put the heat on the LAPD. The hunt for the Sunset Strip Killer, as the cops dubbed the man they thought they were tracking, ended in 1980, when Carol Bundy branched off on her own. Returning to the bar she’d met Clark in, she encountered an ex-lover, went parking with him, shot him, and sawed off his head with a boning knife. “ ‘Doug cut a head off, I cut a head off, and I did it better,’ “said Detective Orozco, paraphrasing Bundy’s intent. Carol Bundy gave her own summation: “I just sort of went overboard … it was a fantasy that just got badly out of control.”