The memories of their wedding commingled with shared murder, Karla and Paul found themselves so far down the river there was nothing to do but go on. “Karla and I had evolved so much in our sex lives,” Bernardo tried to explain, understating the case to the exact degree that he failed to grasp its enormity. “We were drinking every day and doing drugs.” Losing hold of reason. Letting go. The couple drugged and assaulted Jane Doe again that August. They began stalking women they met in bars and restaurants or saw on the street. Other assaults were planned and scrapped. Finally, in April 1992, they engaged in the crazily brazen daylight abduction of Kristen French, dragging her into their car in the middle of a church parking lot. The fifteen-year-old had been walking home from school for Easter weekend.
The videotapes show a progression in Karla’s direct involvement in these crimes. By 1992, she is orchestrating much of the action herself. “Suck him now, Kristen,” she says at some point during French’s three-day captivity. “Good girl.” She sounds about as perturbed as a camera assistant on a porn shoot. “Now use your hand. Yeah. Good girl.” She proudly tells Paul, “I got some great mouth shots.” On Easter Sunday, at Karla’s insistence, French was murdered. She was strangled for a full seven minutes, Homolka told the court (for it wasn’t taped). She watched. Then she went downstairs to blow-dry her hair. The couple had to go to Easter dinner with her family.
According to Candice Skrapec, “One key to understanding a woman who kills repeatedly may be the recognition that by killing, she experiences herself as someone who matters, as the agent of some substantial happening and, by inference, as powerful. Almost incidentally, she can come to enjoy killing and develop a ‘taste’ for it.” After Carol Bundy’s first murder, she thought (as she told Orozco), “Well, I’m ten times as cool as he is, and I don’t have half the experience.” The rush was undeniable. “After a while, it got to be a joint venture where we were both enjoying it.” This seems to be true for less extreme crimes as well. “I was unwilling to at first,” one female sex offender recalled, describing her molestation of children, “but then after a while it got to the point where I liked it.”
In August 1992, Karla and Paul went to Disneyworld, where she vamped for the camera in a white bikini, unsullied by the beating she would claim to have received. She was tanned almost beyond recognition, her stiff, moussed hair the color of Florida sand. She waved her pretty white bottom, did a campy striptease. Paul, mocking the reporters in Playboy, asked her what she enjoyed. “Showing off,” she said and laughed. “Licking little girls,” she added. “Making my man happy.” Then she waved the camera away, bored. “End of show.” She sauntered out of the frame.
A week later, she and Paul were in a primly decorated room at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. They’d hired a hooker who looked like a wiser, weather-beaten version of Karla. “She’s very good-looking,” Karla says appraisingly as the three lounge about, the hidden camera blinking from inside Paul’s suitcase. Homolka is not intimidated by this tough street-walker. Paul is. His jokey conversation is nervous and self-conscious. He doesn’t know how far he can go. He’s tentative, asking her what he’s allowed to do, repeatedly losing his way. His apologetic bravado is so familiar to the hooker she barely listens. “Working girls are used to it, Sweetie,” she says. She’s no fool. “You’re rough people, you like [rough sex,]” she points out, surmising the reason he’s lost his erection. At one point, as she performs oral sex, he reaches his two hands out as if to hit or strangle her, then leaves them frozen there in midair, lost.
By the autumn of 1992, the Bernardo marriage was imploding from the pressure of its own moral chaos, into violence, paranoia, and loathing. “Events bonded us,” Bernardo said at his trial, “but [they] also tore us apart.” In an audiotape he recorded after Karla left him, he conceded that he’d treated her “like shit near the end.” Indeed, he turned on her with real savagery. Having smashed every boundary of human restraint and gone into crazed dissolution, he went after Homolka like a rabid animal, pulling out her hair, hammering her head with hard objects, forcing her to eat shit.
Bernardo’s intense “frustration,” as he described it, was fueled by his sudden sense of impotence. He was still unemployed. He was on the lam from the Metropolitan Toronto Police, who would shortly match DNA from blood and hair samples he’d given them to that of the Scarborough Rapist. He hadn’t been able to confine himself to legal seduction. He was spurned by both Jane Doe and her successor, another young friend of Homolka’s, to whom he had sent a note threatening to kill himself if she didn’t sleep with him. She wrote back, indifferent, “Whatever.” Humiliated and cornered, Bernardo blamed Homolka. He’d come to depend on her for his crimes, but in the process his perfect wife, his soul mate and accomplice, had been corrupted. Whereas they had once held up mirrors of the other’s idealized artifice, the Big Bad Businessman and his swooning Princess, they now reflected back a true depravity, like a pair of Dorian Grays.
It’s common for clever serial rapists and killers to suddenly get themselves caught. Criminologists believe this has something to do with psychic exhaustion, that the lie they are living can no longer hold. During the Christmas holidays Bernardo compelled Homolka to announce the sham of their marriage by blackening both of her eyes. It was the one thing he knew he couldn’t get away with. He exposed her. After a frantic, unsuccessful search for the videotapes, she allowed her shocked family to take her home.
A doctor who saw Homolka shortly after her flight from Bernardo described her attitude toward him not as fearful so much as “vengeful.” She would, and did, arrange his downfall. She has never been candid about this, but Carol Bundy described her own experience: “Going to the police was the final act that I could do to save myself … the relationship was deteriorating, breaking down, the sense of closeness and rapport that I had initially felt with him, the attraction, was dissipating in the horror of it, and the fear, and a whole lot of things that I wasn’t used to dealing with. Just the whole thing was caving in … I was willing to face my responsibility and … admit the things that I had done, but if I was going to do that, I damn well was going to take him with me.”
Despondent, drinking heavily, Bernardo made a tape for Homolka sometime in January, which he never sent. The police would find it in their search of the house and dub it “The Suicide Tape,” because of Bernardo’s disingenuous claim that he was going to kill himself. The tape is a striking example of psychopathic expression. It’s the clichés. Language borrowed from lonely-hearts ads. Bernardo’s lover of five years has vanished from his life, and all he can say, over and over, is “God, you’re so beautiful,” and whistle along to the theme song of the movie Free Willie. He freqently shifts gears. “Okay, check this out!” he says at one point, and then loops his taped statement, just made, pleading undying remorse, like a DJ in a dance hall.
Homolka proved no better than Bernardo at sustaining a sense of grief. After three days in a hospital, she went to Brampton, Ontario, to stay with her aunt and uncle. “I felt like I was seventeen years old again!” she told the police later. “I was so happy, I forgot about Tammy, I forgot about Leslie, and I had a great time.” All the while, through the universally sympathetic response she received, Homolka was discovering the imagistic value of two black eyes. For months, she had feared them as her undoing, and now they would be her salvation.
Later, from her prison cell, she wrote to a friend, “I know what you mean about loving Christmas. It’s always been my favourite time of year. Of course, since Tammy died things haven’t been the same. But one thought I’ve always held is that she wouldn’t want us to live in misery over the holidays.” She added, “Life is going to be so great when I’m out of here. I am trying to change myself back into a newer, better version of the person I was before I met Paul … I am going to live so differently. I’m going to start horseback riding again. I also want to do volunteer work—I would love to work on the Kids Help Phone.” And onward with her daydreams: “Go out on picnics
with my friends and sister,” and “I really need single girlfriends to go out and meet men with.” In another letter, she said she’d just heard that a rape victim had sued her and Bernardo for her physical and emotional suffering. “Wow!” Homolka exclaimed. “I don’t know what this woman thinks she’s going to get, because Paul and I are broke!”
In the autumn of 1995, Dr. David King, chief of forensic pathology at McMaster Hospital in Hamilton and the man who conducted Leslie Mahaffy and Tammy Homolka’s autopsies, telephoned the Toronto Globe & Mail. He said that the crown attorney’s office had asked him to review Kristen French’s autopsy report in preparation for Bernardo’s trial. He had done so, and what he found was so at odds with Homolka’s account of the murders that the crown refused to call him as a witness to the stand. “I do not think,” he told the Globe, that “Kristen French died from ligature strangulation and I certainly don’t think she died from having an electrical cord tied around her neck for seven minutes. There’s no way.” The ligature marks on French’s neck were shallow and slight, as if, at most, she’d chafed against a cord. “I’ve been so upset about the whole thing. The prosecution deliberately decided not to use my opinion because it didn’t conform with theirs”—that Bernardo, as the man, was the killer.
King found two additional discrepancies between Homolka’s testimony and the condition of the bodies. There were two, identical pairs of circular bruises on both girls’ backs that could be detected only on the innermost layers of muscle, next to the lowest ribs. They weren’t visible on the skin surface, and therefore weren’t caused by exterior blows. The findings were consistent with someone perhaps having kneeled on the girls, possibly to suffocate them while their heads were facedown on a soft surface, such as a pillow, an expedient way to kill them if they were too drugged to resist.
Finally, King found severe bruising in a uniform pattern across Kristen’s face, as if she had been bludgeoned with a blunt object; the girl had bitten her tongue, and her mouth was filled with blood. King felt this injury was more likely the cause of death than strangulation. He added, because the Globe reporter asked him, that the bruising would be consistent with being hit with a mallet—the weapon that Karla Homolka had used to “guard” Kristen French when Bernardo went out.
In September and October, as Americans reeled from the acquittal of O.J. Simpson and argued about what it meant for battered women, Canadians struggled to grasp a different lesson. They (like the British, watching the trial of Rosemary West) had come to realize that Homolka was no battered woman, painfully trying to recover from her trauma. She had become, as Myra Hindley had been at the outset, a totem of pure evil. Those who covered or attended the trial began to have nightmares. Schoolchildren needed to discuss her with their teachers. Conservatives and feminists found themselves, for the first time in this arena, on common ground, frankly outraged at what had gone down. Citizens signed petitions across the nation demanding that Homolka’s plea-bargained sentence be overturned. Over three hundred thousand signatures flooded politicians’ offices. A senator tried to introduce a bill in the Canadian parliament that would pass a law, exclusive to Karla Homolka, keeping her locked behind bars.
It was too late. The crown decided that a deal is a deal. If it wasn’t, none of the thousands of other criminals who plea-bargain in exchange for information would come forward. Homolka can be out horseback riding and picnicking as early as 1997. By the tenth anniversary of Leslie Mahaffy’s dismemberment in her basement, the year 2001, it will be mandatory for the state to let her go.
“I have been told that murder is the easiest of crimes to get away with,” Carol Bundy wrote to a friend from her jail cell in 1980. “I believe it. If I hadn’t confessed … ah well. Too late. Too late.”
ISLAND OF WOMEN
The World of the Female Prison
A woman in prison is not a dangerous man.
Headline, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, July 3, 1996
An air of viciousness pervaded the whole place. Everyone was frightened of everyone else.
JOSIE O’DWYER, inmate, Borstal and Holloway prisons
When Dorothea Puente was convicted of homicide, she retraced the routes of her migrant childhood, back through the San Joaquin Valley of central California along Route 99, past orchards and almond groves to the Central California Women’s Facility, near the town of Chowchilla. From a distance, all one can see of CCWF are giant stadium lights rising in a ring along the flat plateau. Driving closer, along a one-lane highway, a complex of low, red brick bungalows comes into view. The prison is surrounded by two rows of electrified barbed wire fencing, fourteen feet high, nine feet apart, making it feel open and oddly transparent. Chowchilla, as it’s called, was built in 1987 to supplement the state women’s prison at Frontera, an hour’s drive south of Los Angeles. In less than ten years, CCWF’s population surged from two thousand to four thousand inmates and a sister facility opened across the highway in 1995. Christened the Valley State Prison for Women, it went immediately into overcrowding as well. In 1994, California women’s prisons received 592 new violent offenders, 1,454 property offenders, and 1,696 drug offenders. As of mid-December 1995, the state had 9,162 women in custody, for crimes ranging from armed robbery to drive-by shooting, smoking crack to dealing heroin, embezzlement to serial homicide.
The women at CCWF are divided into five yards, A through E, which consist of double-winged dormitories, each surrounded by an expansive lawn replete with baseball diamond, immovable metal patio furniture, flowerbeds, and gym weights. The only section of CCWF that truly resembles a prison are buildings 503 and 505. Each is two stories high, guarded by watchtowers, constructed of steel-reinforced brick, with narrow, enclosed cement exercise yards and steel-barred gates, which are incongruously painted pale pink. Each building has two floors (the second a catwalk) lined with rows of locked metal doors. Through small viewing windows, one can see the six-by-eight-foot cells, furnished with metal cots and lidless, stainless steel toilets. Building 503 is the gateway to CCWF, housing new inmates, no matter their crimes, for a minimum of five days. The purpose is to dry them out, calm them down, observe their behavior. Who’s going to be a troublemaker? Who gets assigned to which yard? Building 505 has two wings, each of which houses forty women at any given time, for two months to a year, after they’ve committed assaults or other serious infractions in their yards. Guards and visitors here are required to wear protective vests. Women in lockdown are not happy campers.
In the bottom right-hand corner of 505 is a corridor of nine cells with an outer perimeter of bars, which creates a narrow cage for residents to pace. This is death row, the rarest destination in the world for a woman of California. Only four women have been executed in the state in the twentieth century, the last one in 1962. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977, no governor has signed a woman’s death warrant. When serial murderess Louise Peete taunted the U.S. Supreme Court by saying that “No gentleman would put a lady to her death,” she was almost entirely correct. The only four who lost that gamble in California were safely beyond the pale of voter sympathy—Peete herself, plus two notorious organized crime figures, and a woman who killed her husband for his money in the 1950s.
Today, there are six women on death row at Chowchilla. Mary Ellen Samuels hired her daughter’s fiancé to kill her Hollywood cinematographer husband. He wanted a divorce, and his life insurance was worth more than his alimony. Samuels then hired additional hit men to kill her daughter’s fiancé, and was photographed some months after the murders, lying nude on a hotel bed, in a bath of $100 bills. Rosie Alfaro was a drug addict who stabbed a nine-year-old girl fifty-seven times while robbing her home. Maureen McDermott was a respected nurse who hired a hit man to kill her female roommate for the mortgage on their house. Catherine Thompson killed her husband for his life insurance. Cynthia Lynn Coffman abducted and strangled two teenaged girls during a crime spree with her boyfriend, an ex-con known as the Folsom Wolf. Caroline Young slashed her two small grandc
hildren to death with a butcher’s knife to protest their father’s taking custody. (Their mother was in jail on a drug charge and hadn’t ever told the father that he’d sired her children. He found out when the state hit him with twelve thousand dollars’ worth of back pay for child support, at which point he requested, and gained, custody.) It is a testament to the arbitrariness of the death penalty that both Dorothea Puente and Carol Bundy are milling around in the yards.
To house the general population, all four women’s prisons in California are constructed as cottage-style compounds, the theory being that women don’t escape by digging tunnels or scaling walls. They don’t need to be confined in the sort of stone fortresses built for men. “I think women are escape risks, as much as men. Absolutely. It’s just that they don’t go over a gate. Here, they enlist help,” says CCWF Lieutenant Toby Wong, a convivial, suavely dressed man in his thirties. He is strolling the yards with his visitor, as relaxed and expansive as a real estate agent showing off a house, except that he has a black belt in karate and the house is ringed by scorching wire.
Wong moves through the compound, nodding to guards who sit in bubble-enclosed control booths. He sweeps his gaze back and forth for potential trouble and muses on the special challenges of guarding women. Correctional officers need to struggle with their own prejudices, he explains. They need to resist the sentiments that the Sacramento social work community invested in Dorothea Puente: that women who come to them, friendly and helpful, are not capable of using that cover to conceal a power play. “I tell my staff, ‘Never be alone with an inmate. I don’t want you set up, fool,’ “says Wong. “Men have a cover officer because they might get hurt. Here, you need one in case you get set up.” Indirect strategies of aggression are common in women’s prisons, perpetrated not only by inmates but by guards.
When She Was Bad Page 24
