Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  Using police reports, diagrams, eyewitness accounts, and re-creations of the Camaro’s reported position at various points in the crime, “The Abduction of Kristen French” had as its goal finally going public with the major details of the case in the hopes that a viewer would recognize something that could get the investigation moving. For the first time publicly, police revealed the witness accounts of the two men seen in the car and presumed to be involved in the kidnapping. A phone bank staffed by trained volunteers took called-in tips throughout the program and in the weeks following the broadcast. Using the clue of the map found at the crime scene, one of the first things Bevan and host Dan McLean did was urge people to call in about any adult male in the area around that time who had aroused their suspicion by asking for directions or help. One of the main focuses was on trying to locate the car, which could then be traced back to an owner.

  When Gregg McCrary came on about halfway through the broadcast, he went over the main points of his profile, explaining what the various behavioral clues suggested about this UNSUBin his mid-twenties to early thirties who was already a seasoned sexual criminal. Cutting off Kristen’s beautiful dark hair indicated his emotional need to humiliate and degrade women to cover for his own personal and sexual inadequacy. Then he outlined the typical relationship between dominant and submissive partners in sexual crime. He explained what to look for in the offender’s behavior and how it would have changed recognizably to those around him in the days and weeks after Kristen was taken.

  Essentially, there would be a total disruption in his (or their) normal life from April 16 to at least April 30, the day her body was found. We knew Kristen was still alive up until very close to that date, which meant the UNSUB would have been preoccupied feeding, maintaining, and monitoring her wherever he kept her imprisoned, as well as repeatedly assaulting her according to the dictates of his fantasy. This disruption didn’t necessarily mean he’d miss work all during that time if, in fact, he had a steady job, but it would mean that he would be preoccupied, stressed, and his demeanor would be noticeably different to friends and co-workers. He would be following the investigation and press reports very closely, and would engage frequently in discussions of the case and the progress—or lack thereof—the police were making. If he were in an ongoing relationship with a woman, that relationship would also be more stressful than usual; there would be more frequent and severe flare-ups of temper and he would be even more abusive.

  The main purpose of our profiles is to let observers recognize behavior and help identify an UNSUB. By increasing the amount of information available to the public, we’re potentially letting the people closest to the UNSUB become profilers themselves.

  Almost all sexual serial killers, particularly of the organized variety, will follow closely what the media reports about the investigation. When we go in on a search warrant, we’re not surprised to see scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, and videotapes of news reports in the offender’s possession. We therefore assumed Kristen’s killer or killers would be tuned in to this highly publicized broadcast. So at one point Dan McLean asked Gregg what the killer would be feeling.

  “Stress,” Gregg replied, none of it having to do with feelings of guilt or remorse, but real worry over the possibility of discovery and apprehension.

  “And if you are watching,” Gregg declared, speaking directly to Kristen French’s unknown killer, “I want to tell you that you are going to be apprehended. It’s just a question of when.”

  If someone out there recognized the behavior Gregg and Sergeant Cavanagh described and came through with a tip, then that apprehension would come sooner rather than later. But it would come, Gregg emphasized, and the UNSUB had better not rest easy.

  He went on to explain that as the UNSUB’s stress level escalated, close friends and family members would be in increasing danger. He would become increasingly angry and erratic, increasingly unable to control his fear and his temper. The two people who would be in the gravest danger would be the two people who presumably knew about his crimes: his submissive helper and his wife or girlfriend. Unlike the primary killer, either of them might be having a problem coping with the guilt of having participated in the killing of an innocent person. Gregg and the police urged either of those two accessories to come forward before it was too late and one of them became the next victim.

  Vince Bevan stated, “If you’re listening, please, for your own good, give us a call!”

  This kind of proactive technique had paid off handsomely for us in the past. In one example, a stenographer named Donna Lynn Vetter who worked in one of the FBI field offices in the Southwest was raped and brutally murdered by an intruder who broke into her ground-floor garden apartment. The Bureau director at the time felt he had to send a strong and immediate message: you don’t kill FBI personnel and get away with it. Two of Quantico’s best and most experienced agents—Roy Hazelwood from Behavioral Science (the teaching and research side) and Jim Wright from the Investigative Support Unit—were dispatched immediately to the site on the director’s jet.

  After examining the murder scene and the preliminary forensics, Roy and Jim agreed that it had been a rape gone bad; murder was not the offender’s planned or primary intention. They also felt they had a pretty good behavioral image of the assailant—his background and educational level, how close he lived to the apartment, his sustained anger and personal inadequacy. They felt he would have confided the fact of the crime to someone close to him, either a colleague or a woman with whom he was living in an abusive, though dependent, relationship. That individual, the agents felt, would now be in danger. In the short amount of time they had in town before having to return to Quantico, they gave interviews to the local media, giving out most (though not all) of the details of their profile, and urging the UNSUB’s confidant to come forward before he or she were hurt or killed.

  Within a couple of weeks, the killer’s armed robbery partner contacted the police. The subject was arrested, a palm print matched up with one found at the murder scene, and he was charged. The profile turned out to be gratifyingly accurate in nearly every significant detail. He was a twenty-two-year-old male who lived with, and was financially dependent on, his sister. At the time of the murder he was on probation for rape. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed a couple of years ago.

  It was a similar result we were hoping for from this program televised throughout Canada.

  Kristen French’s killer was, in fact, tuned in to and taping the broadcast.

  His name was Paul Kenneth Bernardo, and as he watched, he rejoiced in arrogant glee at how inaccurate he thought the profile was. Though he was twenty-eight years of age, he didn’t work with his hands or in a metal shop. He was highly intelligent, had majored in accounting in college, and had worked as a junior accountant at Price Waterhouse before failing the rigorous national accounting exam. For the last several years he had made his living, often a good one, smuggling crates of American cigarettes across the Canadian border and reselling them, often to biker gangs. He didn’t own or drive a cream-colored Chevy Camaro. Instead, he had a champagne-gold Nissan 240SX hatchback which had been used in the kidnapping in the church parking lot. No two people witness a crime quite the same way, but this underscores why I never accept eyewitness statements as gospel. Moreover, Bernardo didn’t have a submissive male partner in crime. The person who had helped him abduct Kristen French and force her into the car was his beautiful blond wife of less than a year, twenty-two-year-old Karla Leanne Homolka.

  It was Karla to whom Paul brought Leslie Mahaffy the night she was locked out of her parents’ house. He’d been stalking Leslie. He saw her on the porch and struck up a conversation. She’d told him what had happened, bummed a cigarette, gotten into his car to talk. Then he’d pulled a knife on her, blindfolded her, and drove to his house.

  The cops were looking for a nonexistent male accomplice and a nonexistent car.

  “They’ll never catch me!” Ber
nardo exclaimed to Karla as he watched. Agent McCrary’s promise that sooner or later he would be apprehended was laughable.

  What Paul Bernardo apparently failed to grasp was all the ways that Cavanagh’s and McCrary’s profiles were dead on the money. He didn’t support himself by working with his hands, but he did have a basement workshop whose tools he had used to cut apart Leslie Mahaffy and encase the body parts in cement blocks molded from cardboard boxes. He did regularly and systematically abuse and humiliate his wife through beatings, nonconsensual sadistic sexual practices, and such demeaning habits as locking her in the root cellar of their rented house and making her sleep on the floor beside his bed. He did require constant phony reassurance to deal with his problem of erectile insufficiency and recurring impotence, demanding that Karla, his previous girlfriends, and all of his victims call him “king” and “master” as he ritualistically choked or sodomized them or otherwise dominated them sexually.

  And he did have prior criminal experience. In fact, though the police didn’t know who he was, he already had quite a reputation.

  He was “the Scarborough Rapist.”

  The Scarborough Rapist terrorized the northeast suburb of Toronto for which he was named from May 1987 through May 1990. His key modus operandi was coming up behind women as they got off buses, usually late at night, overpowering them and raping them. As he attacked, he mentally tortured them, saying he was going to kill them and calling them slut, bitch, whore, and worse. Gregg McCrary made a trip to Toronto during that time and he and I both worked on a profile of the rapist, coming up with a description pretty close to this individual who watched the television show so gleefully that night.

  No one in any official capacity made much of a connection between the Scarborough Rapist and the Schoolgirl Murders because the MO was so different. The rapist had waited at bus stops and blitzed his victims from behind. And he had not killed. The murderer, on the other hand, grabbed his victims in broad daylight or from the steps of their own house. What they didn’t factor in was that several years had elapsed between the initial Scarborough rapes and Leslie Mahaffy’s murder and one of the things we predicted about the rapist was that he would escalate in his rage and learn from his own experience.

  Though Paul Bernardo had no criminal record, the police already had a file on him. On Tuesday, May 29, 1990, the Toronto Sun had run a composite drawing of the Scarborough Rapist, based on a description by his most recent victim, the only one who got a good look at him. The drawing looked uncannily like Paul Bernardo, so much so that some of his friends joked that he could be the rapist. One of them took it more seriously and actually contacted police with the tip. This led police to make a visit to Bernardo, in which he was cooperative and charming and agreed to blood, hair, and saliva samples.

  Though he was never officially cleared of suspicion, neither was the matter pursued. DNA testing was a laborious and time-consuming process and the police lab had extremely limited capacity, so limited that it would have taken them years to process samples based on every lead or tip. Paul Bernardo, who had no police record of any kind, was never high on the list of suspects. So his sample was never even processed. Had it been, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French might be alive today.

  And another victim, too, one that the Green Ribbon task force hadn’t even considered because no one knew she was a victim. That was Karla Homolka’s younger sister, Tammy. Fifteen-year-old Tammy Lyn Homolka was blond and beautiful like her older sister. Early in the morning of Christmas Eve 1990, Tammy had died at St. Catharines General Hospital after losing consciousness under mysterious circumstances at her parents’ house. Paul and Karla had been in the house at the time, saying they had all fallen asleep watching television. They awoke to the sound of Tammy’s wheezing and labored breathing, which quickly became total respiratory distress. They were the ones who called the ambulance. Police ruled the death an accident.

  In reality, Tammy was the object of sexual obsession of her sister’s fiancé, Paul, who got Karla to help him drug her so he could have sex with her while she was unconscious. Still under the effects of the drug, Tammy aspirated her own vomit. The following June, Paul and Karla were married in an elaborate ceremony and reception. It was the same day the pieces of Leslie Mahaffy’s body were found in Lake Gibson.

  The obvious question that should occur around now is how, in the name of God, could an intelligent young woman with so much going for her marry the man responsible for the rape and death of her sister, submit to his beatings and physical and emotional degradations, and actually take part in his schemes to kidnap, assault, and kill innocent young women?

  I wish there was an easy answer to this question; there isn’t, though we’ve been studying the phenomenon of sexual sadists and their compliant victims for years. What we do know is what does happen, all too often. Through the pioneering leadership of Roy Hazelwood, we’ve identified the common progressive steps in a sexually sadistic relationship that frequently starts relatively normally.

  First, the sexual sadist identifies a naive, dependent, or vulnerable woman. She may, in fact, be vulnerable because she’s currently in an abusive relationship and she legitimately sees this new man as rescuing her from it.

  Second, the sadist charms the woman with gentleness, gifts, emotional or financial support, physical protection, whatever she needs. She will see him as loving and supportive and she’ll love him in return. Paul Bernardo was charming, handsome, and smooth. Women were always falling for him.

  Third, once he achieves that goal, the sadist will begin to encourage or persuade her to engage in sexual practices she might consider unusual, bizarre, or kinky. At first this will be an occasional thing. Eventually, it will evolve into the regular routine between them, which will have the effect both of breaking down her will and breaking down her sense of values and the norms with which she was brought up. This, in turn, will help isolate her from her family and anyone she might want to talk to, because she won’t want to talk about these sexual activities.

  Fourth, the sadist completes this practice of isolation by discouraging her from having anything to do with her family or friends. He needs to approve of everything she does, her comings and goings and everyday activities. He needs to become the center of her existence, to the exclusion of all else. He might take away credit cards, control and dole out cash, insist she be home at a particular time and punish her severely if she isn’t. In fact, any perceived disobedience or lapse in loyalty can be met by punishment.

  Fifth, when the woman is isolated from everyone else, the sadist becomes her only support system. She strives to warrant his love and affection and avoid his anger and wrath, even though both have little to do with her and all to do with his moods and whims. Everything the sadist does, everything he says to her, confirms her new self-image as bad, inferior, stupid, or inadequate, warranting the anger and punishment which is now regularly visited upon her. There were literally hundreds of cards and letters and notes from Karla to Paul apologizing for all her faults and promising to try to do better.

  In every important way, Roy’s five-step analysis turns out to be a very accurate characterization of Karla Homolka after she met Paul Bernardo. It later came out that during Kristen French’s imprisonment, the bright and resourceful teen tried to convince Karla to help her escape and to go with her. But Karla was so beaten down, with such a bleak, isolated outlook by this point, that all she could think of was Paul’s anger and the severity of the punishment she would receive when he found out. This totally overrode her revulsion at watching the rape and abuse of this innocent girl, knowing full well the murder that was to follow.

  Though certain family members and friends knew Paul had hit Karla on occasion, no one either recognized or acknowledged the reality of a severely abusive relationship. She always made excuses for the bruises and welts from his beatings. Either she’d fallen down, or she’d been in a car accident, or one of the animals at the veterinary clinic where she worked had turned on her
. Even as Karla was undressing one day to try on her wedding gown, two of her friends had noticed large bruises on her too-thin body. But at the time they said nothing.

  Paul continually hinted to her that he would kill her someday. During his sadistic role playing, he would even choke her with the same cord he used to strangle the two girls. He blackmailed her into silence by threatening to tell her parents the truth about Tammy. That was the one thing she couldn’t stand to think about.

  Most sexual sadists are totally self-involved narcissists and Paul Bernardo was no exception. He favored stylish designer clothes, fancied himself an entrepreneur, blamed the world for his failures. He thought he could go on the way he had forever, punctuating his complete manipulation, domination, and control of his once outgoing and exuberant wife with frequent liaisons with other women and adventures with abducted teenage girls. He’d even fantasized about starting a colony of sexual slaves. Before he even began his rapes, he’d already established a long-standing practice of sitting in his car positioned so he could watch young girls through their bedroom windows as they undressed. Often he was able to catch the action on video. As far as we know, no one noticed or came forward to report this behavior. And if they had, would it have been taken seriously?

  What finally sank Paul Bernardo was what we in the unit predicted would, though it’s doubtful Karla was thinking about Gregg McCrary’s words when she went, through intermediaries, to the police. Ultimately, the reality of her situation was unavoidable to her and the evidence of abuse became unmistakable to her parents and friends. Even so, she hesitated several times before she finally left.

  A lawyer began negotiating a plea bargain for her in return for testimony against her husband. She checked into Northwestern General Hospital for seven weeks of psychiat ric evaluation. The final bargain called for a twelve-year jail sentence, which was then approved by the families of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Paul Bernardo was arrested on February 17, 1993. Typically for this type of sexual sadist, he also proved himself to be a self-centered coward. Once he got to jail he underwent what Gregg McCrary calls a major “attitude adjustment.” He began complaining to authorities he was afraid the other prisoners might give him back some of his own medicine and had to be isolated from the general prison population for his own protection.