Journey into Darkness (13 page)

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.

The ensuing trial, for which the judge imposed a total news blackout as is legal in Canada, became that country’s “Trial of the Century.” The crime riveted Canadians to the same degree as the O.J. Simpson case did during some of the same period of time in the summer of 1995.

During weeks of testimony, Karla unfolded the entire story of their relationship, discussing such horrifying details as the videotapes Paul made not only of himself debasing her, but raping and tormenting the teenage girls as well. She testified how Paul had made Kristen watch the tape of Leslie’s rape in an effort to control her and make her compliant. She also told how she had been the one to cut off Kristen’s long black hair according to Paul’s orders. She told how Paul religiously followed the Scarborough Rapist and, later, Schoolgirl Murder investigations, just as we predicted the perpetrator would.

And just as Gregg had outlined in his profile, Bernardo sat through all the grisly testimony without any emotional reaction or the slightest evidence of remorse or human feeling. His only regret was getting caught and the fact that his wife and personal sexual slave had betrayed him. For his own part, Paul admitted he had taken part in the rapes but that Karla had actually killed the girls.

On Friday, September 1, 1995, after a day of deliberation, the jury brought in verdicts of guilty on all nine counts. The two most serious—murder in the first degree in the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French—brought with them an automatic life sentence with no parole possible for at least twenty-five years.

One of the great tragedies of the Paul Bernardo case is all of the missed opportunity: the opportunity to recognize
the early signs of a criminal, sexually sadistic personality; the opportunity to catch the Scarborough Rapist through DNA before he escalated into killing; the opportunity for an abused wife to leave her husband before she herself became a felon; the opportunity for her friends and family to recognize what should have been obvious to them; the opportunity for Karla to escape with Kristen; and, most overwhelmingly, the opportunity for two beautiful and intelligent young women to grow up, fall in love, have families, and fulfill their glowing promise.

Did we learn anything as profilers from our own mistakes? Sure we did. Would we make some of the same mistakes again? Probably. Given the forensic evidence and the eyewitness accounts, we’d still be looking for two men—a dominant and a submissive partner. But now I think we’d at least bear in mind that a compliant female victim can also be a partner in unspeakable crime.

As I mentioned, the Toronto police called us in on the original Scarborough rapes and Gregg McCrary and I both went up for firsthand consultations on separate occasions. Among the proactive suggestions we came up with at the time was a plan for “hardening targets” just as you would in a series of bank robberies, forcing the UNSUB to strike next where you want him to. This tactic might have worked here, but it was never implemented. The point of this exercise is not to pin blame on any one person or institution. It’s just to suggest that if we could all be more vigilant, more aware of the things that just don’t add up or seem quite right, maybe some future tragedy could be avoided.

And one of the elements of that is to know what you’re looking for, to know who the real enemy is or may be. Back in the 1950s, when times were simpler and J. Edgar Hoover was portrayed not only as the ultimate square-jawed tough guy against crime but also as the stern but loving father figure to all of American youth, the FBI used a drawing to warn kids away from potential danger. I remember it showed a man coming out from behind a tree, offering a bag of candy to an innocent and trusting child. The metaphor and the message were clear: beware of taking candy from strangers.

While the intent behind the drawing was certainly laudable
and the dangers back in the 1950s might have seemed more clear-cut, I’m afraid experience has taught us that we have a lot more to worry about than candy from strangers.

Such was the issue in a third Canadian case in which I was involved. Like the Parrott and Mahaffy and French killings, it involved the rape and murder of an innocent child. Yet its circumstances and lessons were just as different as the first two cases were different from each other.

In January of 1985, while I was up in Toronto advising on prosecution strategy in the murder trial of Tien Poh Su, Detectives John Shephard and Bernard Fitzpatrick of the Criminal Investigative Branch of the Durham Regional Police asked me if I’d drive with them to a recently discovered body dump site and tell them what I thought. I was exhausted; I’d been in court all day and I just wanted to go back to the hotel, have a drink, and crash. They’d already submitted the case to Special Agent Oliver Zink, then profile coordinator of the Buffalo Field Office, and I figured it would eventually make its way back to Quantico. But when I heard the details of the case, it wasn’t something I could easily leave alone.

On the previous October 3, nine-year-old Christine Marion Jessop was seen buying bubble gum on her way home from school in the town of Queensville, Ontario, north of Toronto. That was the last time anyone saw her. A massive search for days by police and volunteers turned up nothing, not a clue.

Fear gripped the small, safe town. The assumption was that someone passing through must have abducted her and carried her away. The mayor and city officials urged parents to warn their children to be wary of outsiders, not to accept gifts or to take candy from strangers. The sense of paranoia was equal to the sense of horror at Christine’s disappearance. It was a sad holiday season in Queensville.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, a farmer and his two daughters were out crossing a field in nearby Sunderland searching for a possible owner of a stray dog they had spotted when they came upon a small human corpse, mostly skeletized, undressed from the waist down except for a pair of white socks with blue trim, arranged in a froglike position. Other clothing, badly decomposed, and a pair of Nike track shoes were
found nearby. And in the nearby grass, inside a canvas pouch, was a recorder type of flute, plastic with a piece of masking tape behind the mouthpiece, the same one Christine had been given in her music class the day she disappeared. Forensic examination and dental records confirmed that the skeletized remains were Christine’s. She had been stabbed several times, and blood and semen stains on her panties indicated she had been sexually assaulted. My oldest child, Erika, was the same age as Christine.

As we drove to the site in an unmarked police car, the two detectives gave me some of the rundown on the case. The Jessop house had been empty that day. Her mother, Janet, and adoptive fourteen-year-old brother, Kenneth, had gone to the dentist and then to see their father, Robert, who was in prison for a white-collar crime.

We knew that Christine had been given this recorder that day and her teacher confirmed to the police that she was very excited about it. We also knew about her buying the gum, and the clerk at the Queensville General Store recalled seeing a dark car down the street which everyone in town assumed to be that of the suspicious stranger who abducted her. I thought this was a red herring that probably had nothing to do with the case. She wasn’t grabbed off the street. We knew she made it home; she parked her bike in the garage. The house was about seventy-five or a hundred yards from the road and I didn’t see any way a stranger would go all the way down the drive and risk being seen when he would have no idea whether anyone else was home or not. It’s a fact of violent crime investigation that people want to help, and so will bring in anything they can think of that might be relevant. This is important and we encourage it. But we also have to be able to sift through what we hear and try to separate the real clues from the incidental details.

They also brought me to talk to Christine’s parents, who gave me a good idea of what their daughter had been like. Later that evening, I remember I was sitting in the back seat of this unmarked car. After viewing the dump site and then going to the house and other relevant areas around town, I said to the detectives, “This is not a stranger homicide. This killer lives in the community. In fact, this killer
knew Christine and lived within a short walking distance to her house.”

The two officers looked at each other, then they both looked back at me. One of them said, “Can you put this down on paper for us tonight?”

I said, “It’s one o’clock in the morning. I’m totally wiped out.” But it seemed really important to them, so I asked for a tape recorder, had them drop me off back at the hotel and I stayed up in the room lying on the bed with the pages of the medical examiner’s report spread out around me as I dictated my thoughts.

Maybe it was because I was so tired, but I found myself going into a near-trance state as I sometimes do. I saw the crime vividly in my own mind.

What I knew about the victimology, what I knew about Christine, was that she was a bright, inquisitive, enthusiastic child. When she got home from school, I felt, she was excited about this new recorder, but no one was home to share her excitement. So what I believe she did was seek out someone else in the neighborhood, someone she could tell, someone who would appreciate what she was learning in music class. Whoever that person was, I said, was probably the killer.

The UNSUB had to take her away in a car. He’d either have to take a back route or risk driving through town where he could be spotted. Either way, he clearly knew where he was going. He knew the area well. He would have had to, to have arrived at this rural, secluded field in nearby Sunderland.

I believe what happened next would have been in some ways similar to what happened to Alison Parrott. At some point along the way, Christine would have realized they weren’t going where the UNSUB said he was taking her, possibly to see her father. She became frightened, at which point he probably took out the knife to control her. But he couldn’t even control this slight, skinny nine-year-old girl, which underscored the fact that he was not a professional killer. The situation developed spontaneously when she presented him with the opportunity.

She was a very outgoing and friendly child. He may have misinterpreted her openness and enthusiasm and thought
she would welcome his sexual advances since that was part of his fantasy, either with Christine specifically or with preteen and young teen girls in general. This is not uncommon among sexually immature offenders. He probably began fondling her or forcing her into oral sex. He was well-known to the family, I believed, and when she started yelling or crying, he knew she’d tell her mother. So he had to kill her. The stab wounds all over the body show that he had a hard time subduing her. Even though she was hurt, she’d tried to escape from him. On one of the ribs, the medical examiner actually found that the knife had hit bone.

The individual I described would probably be in his early to mid-twenties, I said, though in this instance age was hard to predict. Given his difficulty controlling this young girl, not to mention the objects of his fantasy life, he could be somewhat older, a case of arrested emotional development. I said that the police had probably already interviewed him.

The wide pattern of the stab wounds further confirmed for me that she had tried to struggle. It also suggested that this was not an experienced offender. In all probability, this was his first homicide, though I thought he might have a prior record of nuisance type crimes, voyeurism or small arsons. In the case of an older or more experienced UNSUB, I would have expected to see the cause of death as strangulation or blunt-force trauma, which are a whole lot less messy than multiple knife stabs. The body was found many miles from the abduction point, which can tend to point to someone trying to get away from his own area where he is well-known. Also, the condition of the body, spread-eagled and not completely covered up, indicated to me a relatively disorganized offender. For this reason, he’d probably be somewhat disheveled in his appearance, he’d be nocturnal, preferring to sleep during the day, and his job, if he had one, would not be terribly mentally taxing. His car would not be particularly well-maintained and would have high mileage.

I thought there would probably be some major Stressor going on in the UNSUB’s life at the time. The type and details of the crime didn’t lead me to suspect he was married or in an ongoing relationship with another woman, so I didn’t think that would be the most likely reason for his
stress. Perhaps it was a problem at his job or being laid off from one. Perhaps he was living with his parents or some other older relative and they were putting some sort of pressure on him. Whatever the issue was, it likely related to his overall problem with self-esteem. He might even have physical scars or disfigurement, a speech impediment, bad complexion, or something he feels puts him at a disadvantage with women his own age. I thought he would be someone in the neighborhood who plays with children and associates with people younger than himself.