When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  The intermingling of two people’s fantasies, delusions, or fears is commonly known as folie à deux. Clinically, psychiatrists describe it as shared psychotic disorder. SPD generally refers to cases in which paranoid-delusional persons manage to infuse their lovers (or parents or siblings) with their own insanity. Because they’re charismatic, and the person they’re with is hyperimaginative and suggestible, their version of reality becomes the dominant one. Contrary to what we might immediately assume about who would be more suggestible, a review of the literature on SPD dating from 1942 indicates that women are, overwhelmingly, the charismatics to whom men or other women succumb.

  Why would anyone, male or female, begin to subscribe to a patently insane world view? Why did the Manson girls come to believe so fervently in what Charles Manson said, until it became logical to them to kill? As with cults, the self-imposed social isolation of the couple is a critical ingredient in folie à deux, in that they’re removed from reality checks and begin to drift. Substance abuse—booze, pot, cocaine—plays a frequent role in the spiral. Another key is time. One partner is gradually exposed to the other’s mindset and accommodates the madness bit by bit. Carol Bundy had never entertained the notion of murder until Doug Clark brought it into her house. In April 1980, he returned to their shared apartment in the wee hours, splattered with blood. Carol said, “It is very difficult to find a reasonable explanation for a man coming home coated with blood, shaking, really, really shaking, and collapsing on the bathroom floor.” Clark told her that he led a secret life as a hit man and had been in an altercation with another hit man, named, uh, Nick. “Too many people,” Carol scoffed, “tell me that they’re hit men.” But she let it go. The second time Doug came home covered in blood, Carol came up with an explanation of her own: “I thought maybe he had run over a dog or something. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.” But not the next one. “As things progressed, I was forced to accept that murders were going on. Ordinarily, one would not meet a murderer.… a person who has murdered two or three or four on up is almost inconceivable.”

  “Initially,” notes clinical psychiatrist Jose Silveira, “there is a state of perplexity and confusion which is uncomfortable and which constitutes a powerful drive to understand the lived experience. Any explanation, even though in itself frightening, appears to be more comfortable than the dread of not knowing.” Ultimately, however, there can also be an active wanting at work, a desire to subscribe to the wilder mind, an urge that may be more operative in criminal pairs than in noncriminals who suffer shared psychotic disorder. “Part of me was desperately terrified,” Bundy said. “Part of me was drawn to the apparent danger in this, the risk that I was facing.… It was sort of a love-hate type of complex. Wanting, yet not wanting. Being afraid, yet being attracted to what I was afraid of.”

  The most common delusion in folie à deux is persecutory—the belief that someone or something is out to get the couple and destroy them. In the 1994 docudrama Heavenly Creatures, two New Zealand girls get so obsessively involved with each other that they murder one of their mothers for fear she’ll split them up. Neither girl is violent to begin with. Both are in search of a sense of their specialness, which they find by rejecting reality and reinventing a universe to be masters of. They venture further and further into that world until they reach a point together they never would have mapped out alone. The final scene, in which the murder takes place, is a fascinating portrayal of two people wavering on the brink of moral insanity, unable to pull back as long as the eye of the other is on her, never expecting they would get where they found themselves now.

  The second most common delusion in folie à deux is of grandeur, the shared belief that the couple is better, more powerful and glamorous, more entitled than those around them. Grandiosity, it would seem, is the shared conceit of some of our most extreme offenders. During Paul Bernardo’s murder trial, crown attorneys introduced as evidence a videotape that Paul made in the winter of 1991, one month before he and Karla moved into their house in Saint Catharines. He had returned to his lifelong residence, at 21 Sir Raymond Drive in Scarborough, a house in which he had never felt at home. He was a “bastard” there, he said, because his father, who had recently served a prison sentence for sexual assault, wasn’t his sire. His mother had had an affair. He despised her. “Born a bastard, die a bastard!” he often told Homolka. He was driven to create himself anew, and he did so, the videotape revealed, in the sanctuary of his childhood bedroom. The walls of this room were covered with handprinted cards: “Think Big, Be Big.” “Nice Guys Finish Last.” “This isn’t a democracy, it’s a free market.” “If We Can Dream It, We Can Do It.”

  In the midst of this temple to clichés was a picture of his sweetheart. She’d affixed a note: “I love you with all my heart and soul and will.” Karla Homolka’s will went conveniently AWOL during the murder trial of her ex-husband. But there’s little question that it was once as critical to their affair as his own. Attorneys introduced a cascade of Hallmark cards that Karla Homolka had sent to her “Big Bad Businessman,” as she’d nicknamed Paul. Homolka frequently referred to herself as “The Princess” in these cards, as in: “The Princess has finally found her Prince.” Then she would sign off as the “cute, sexy blonde” who was “runner-up” for the title of “sexiest person in the world.” Together they built a temple to status, dyeing their hair blond, dressing like Yuppies, renting a house they couldn’t afford. They indulged in the most pretentious wedding never featured in Vanity Fair, and riffled through Who’s Who looking for a last name that was “less ethnic” than Bernardo, settling on the patrician-sounding Teale. After they were arrested, police found these two books in their bedroom: American Psycho and Miss Manners.

  Watching the evidence unfold in the courtroom, some forensic psychologists began to wonder if Homolka wasn’t a clinically defined narcissist. Narcissists, according to the DSM-IV, “believe that [they are] special and unique and can only be understood by or should associate with other special or high-status people. Their own self-esteem is enhanced by the idealized value that they assign to those with whom they associate.” Narcissists easily attach to psychopaths, who exude a supreme self-confidence and often possess the material flash of success. Bernardo gave Homolka a designer dress and gold jewelry for their first Christmas. She said, “He totally swept me off my feet.” Theirs was a pas de deux between grandiose egos, with the narcissist artfully projecting her fantasies of “success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love” on the flat, reflective surface of the psychopathic soul. “We were the envy of everyone,” she lamented in a card to her cuddly, murderous rapist as the marriage came crashing down. Paul agreed: “We were the Teales, man, we were winners.”

  The narcissist’s drive for admiration, high self-regard, quick-trigger jealousy, and lack of empathy are the qualities that would prove pivotal in Karla Homolka’s initiation into crime. One night in July 1990, Tammy Homolka ran a twenty-minute errand with Paul Bernardo to a liquor store during one of his weekend visits to Saint Catharines. They did not return for six hours, and Bernardo confessed they had been flirting, even kissing, out on the Niagara gorge. Karla was aware of Bernardo’s burgeoning attraction to Tammy. But she piously insisted in court that this episode inspired no spark of jealousy. Bernardo contends, on the other hand, that what happened in July sealed Tammy’s fate. It was a question of what was at stake for Karla. Three years into the romance, Bernardo was enshrined at the center of her universe. He was what set her apart from her sisters.

  She appears to have decided that if Paul had designs on Tammy, he was going to have to play them out in Karla’s home, in front of her. He was not going to be sneaking off on a clandestine rendezvous behind her back. So, a few days after the incident on the gorge, she served her sister spaghetti with Valium, knocking her out so that Paul could pursue his pleasure. It was a classic act of indirect aggression against a female rival, and one over which she maintained full control. But if Kar
la hoped that would be the end of it, it wasn’t, because Bernardo’s infatuation with Tammy went on, as he calculated that it could. Homolka, as a narcissist, craved social approval. Bernardo came to understand that if he stayed by her and played her excellent gentleman in public, he could foray ever more deeply into private perversion without risk of exposure. Exposure was Karla’s idea of hell. “I didn’t want anyone to think that I shouldn’t be with him,” she said in court, explaining why she let Bernardo masturbate in Tammy’s bedroom in the autumn of 1990 and told no one. Privately, she was tormented by the threat her sister posed and grew increasingly enraged. She struck again at Tammy on December 23, 1990, the night that the teenagers can be seen in Bernardo’s family videotape, gamboling about with their piña coladas. Toward the end of Paul’s tape, taken at about 7:30 P.M., Tammy is sitting cross-legged on her parents’ couch in the festively decorated living room. She is listing to one side and slurring her words, grinning sloppily into the camera, too young to be aware that her loss of control is not the result of the sips she’s been taking of her sister’s cocktails, but of the powerful tranquilizer called Halcion.

  Court spectators awaited the audio portion of Tammy Homolka’s rape in an edgy, apprehensive silence. The courtroom speakers spit static. The faint sound of a television or radio drifted out, and then suddenly an adamant, exasperated whisper: “Hurry up, Paul.”

  Further away, somewhere in the Homolka family rec room, comes a distracted “Shut up.”

  “Please hurry before someone comes down” Karla orders in high agitation.

  “Shut up,” Paul whispers back, concentrating on disrobing Tammy, who has passed out from her evening-long stream of sedatives and alcohol. Then: “Yeah, okay. Here we go. Keep her down.”

  Karla holds a cloth soaked in Halothane to her sister’s face. Then she says, “Put something on,” meaning a condom.

  “Shhh,” says Paul, “you’re gettin’ all worked up.”

  “Put it on,” Karla repeats, “put it on.” There’s a pause. “Fucking do it,” she says. Another pause. “Just do it.”

  Moments later, she realizes that he wants her to participate in the assault, and her irritation shifts to upset. She doesn’t want to have sex with her sister. What isn’t clear is whether her resistance springs from concern for Tammy, whom she has just forced to inhale six times the amount of Halothane that veterinarians consider safe for dogs, or repugnance: her sister is menstruating. In any event, she complies, and Paul asks her how it tastes. “Fucking disgusting,” she mutters. Moments later, the tape goes blank.

  The following day, The Toronto Star reported the exchange as: “ ‘Shut up,’ Bernardo was heard to yell at Homolka. ‘Shut up, Karla,’ he repeated later.” In The Toronto Sun, it read: “ ‘Do it now,’ Bernardo’s voice barks on videotapes shown to the jury. ‘No. No,’ Karla responds in a hushed voice.” Reporters were literally unable to perceive Homolka as an active sex offender. Yet, her rape of her sister very much followed the pattern of other women who begin to engage in this crime. In a study of sixteen female sex offenders at the Genesis II Sex Offender program in Saint Paul, Minnesota, three researchers found that 50 percent offended in tandem with men. The solo operators, who had all been sexually abused themselves, reported fantasies prior to the offenses (which usually involved their or their neighbors’ children) and arousal during the act. Only two of the partnered offenders were sexually aroused by what they did, but seven of them cited “feelings of anger, revenge, power, jealousy, and rejection [by] other people” as a motive for the assaults.

  In court, Karla justified Tammy’s rape by saying that Paul threatened her family, although she couldn’t think of any examples, and “he kept bugging me and bugging me.” As the columnist Christie Blatchford of The Toronto Sun wrote so aptly, “Oh, well then.” The Crown accepted Homolka’s explanation because the trial was really just a high-concept one-liner for them: the guy is worse than the girl. It probably made sense on paper, until it had to play out for three months to a riveted nation, serving not just as legal argument, but Meta Explanation for every bend in a river leading darkward toward Kurtz. Bernardo’s defense attorney, John Rosen, challenged Homolka’s hapless acquiescence as absurd. “You had nothing to lose but a boyfriend,” he told her. But Homolka wanted to keep her boyfriend, come hell, high water, or murder. What Bernardo hadn’t anticipated, being a psychopath, was the depth of Karla’s hostility to her sister. The FBI’s concept of “progressive deviance” was less the unfolding of a masculine strategy of coercion than the combustive reaction of his desire and her jealousy.

  Three weeks after Tammy’s death, Karla and Paul lounged naked on a bed in front of a flickering fire in the basement of her parents’ house. As they sipped cocktails, the video camera captured a look of deep serenity between them.

  “I loved it when you fucked my little sister,” Karla says. She is relaxed and affectionate, laughing softly and often. She prattles as she caresses Paul with Tammy’s underwear, and her tone is that of a lover in serenade, sighing ebullient I love yous. “I want you to do it again,” she tells him, meaning rape an adolescent girl. “Do you think we can do that? Do you wanna do it fifty times more? Do it every week then?” Paul, who has been lying on his back, struggles up to his elbows and gazes at her, grinning with surprise.

  “Why would you want to?” he asks.

  “ ‘Cause I love you,” she chirps, “ ‘cause you’re The King.” Laughing, she reaches forward and hugs him. “You can take their virginity. They’ll be our children.”

  Homolka’s palpable pleasure suggests that she has not only vanquished her sibling rival, but has found a way to make her lover’s deviance work in her favor. She will coopt future rivals and remain The Princess, while the rivals are assigned the unthreatening status of “children.” It is an effort at both ownership and objectification. Sharing in Paul’s fantasies, instead of competing with them, returns her to the center, an effect Carol Bundy’s biographer described: “When they talked about it all, everything that was going on, she felt an extraordinary psychological intimacy.” On the stand, Paul Bernardo said much the same thing: “After Tammy died, Karla and I were soul mates.” With her sister dead and buried, she showed Paul’s picture around the Martindale Animal Clinic, basking in oohs and ahs. “I have this ability,” she said in court, after viewing herself rape Tammy on the small courtroom monitor, her face fascinatingly impassive, “to watch but not see.”

  In February, she wrote to her friend Debbie Purdy, “Wedding plans are great. Except my parents are being assholes. They pulled money out saying they can’t afford it. Bullshit! … they are being so stupid. Only thinking of themselves. Screw that … if [Dad] wants to sit at home and be miserable, wallowing in Tammy’s death, then let him.” Karla filled her wedding planner with elaborate notations, and sometime in the spring, the first sex slave stumbled into what John Rosen called “the Venus Fly Trap” of 57 Bayview Drive. The couple had moved there in February, shooting a celebratory video in which Karla bounced around, singing “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and giving a flamboyant tour of her digs with lots of “Ta-dums.”

  The sex slave was identified in court as “Jane Doe,” an adolescent whom Karla had met years before when she worked at a pet shop and Jane Doe came in with her mother. Now Jane was invited over, wined, dined, knocked out, and sodomized before she knew what hit her. (“The fact that the death of Tammy didn’t derail the practice of drugging other victims speaks volumes about the character of the participants,” psychiatrist Angus McDonald wrote to the court.) Apparently, the catalyst for Jane Doe’s rape was a threat that arose unexpectedly when Paul fell for a woman he met in Florida on spring break. He began to reconsider their engagement. A fight ensued, in which Homolka told him acidly that the woman resembled his mother, but he continued to call his Florida belle, and the issue resolved itself only around the time, in late spring, that Karla brought home Jane Doe.

  Homolka didn’t tell the police about th
is assault. When it surfaced on the videos, which police and prosecutors first viewed in September 1994, she suddenly “remembered” the incident in “a dream.” She wrote to her lawyer, George Walker, “Am I gonna get nailed?” On May 26, 1995, prosecutors decided no. She was a battered woman with repressed memory syndrome. They would let the crime go.

  On June 14, 1991, two weeks before the couple’s wedding, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Paul Bernardo impulsively kidnapped Leslie Mahaffy. Mahaffy was in their home for twenty-four hours, and her ability to identify them threatened everything—Paul’s sexual fantasies, Karla’s self-image, the couple’s freedom, and the facade of what Homolka called “normalcy” in a life that was anything but. For people with such low reserves of empathy, killing wasn’t a difficult choice.

  It was, however, an extremely radical turn in the life of a young woman who had, only four years earlier, been a fairly ordinary North American teenager. Her own narcissism and taste for power had taken her a certain distance away from “normalcy.” Jealousy and rage took her further. And folie à deux, an incremental sort of lunacy, took her to the brink she was standing on now. Homolka agreed to (or possibly committed) Mahaffy’s murder as if strangling a young woman who has been in your house overnight—talking to you, eating with you, telling you, because you asked, what her favorite music station was and what she hoped to do when she grew up—was a plausible resolution. If Homolka was haunted, she was able to resume more pleasant dreams through force of will. The next day, she entertained her parents without a hint of upset, and two weeks later, she was on the beaches of Maui, her skin as smooth as peaches and cream, waving to her brand-new husband. The crown contended that Homolka was savagely beaten on this “Honeymoon from Hell.” Under cross-examination, Karla scaled it down to a smack on her “buttocks,” the only part of her anatomy defense attorneys couldn’t see on the honeymoon video. “Hawaii is my favourite place on earth,” she gushed to Paul in a card when they got home. “I can’t believe it’s actually over. I want another wedding!”