The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (38 page)

Karla Homolka is an enigma.

Bright, intensely feminine, and outwardly well adjusted, the twenty-two-year-old veterinarian’s assistant stunned Canadian lawmen in 1993 when she confessed her active role in a sadistic husband-and-wife killing spree.

To their neighbors in suburban Port Dalhousie, Ontario, the winsome Karla and her curly-headed husband, Paul Bernardo, seemed like a perky pair of well-scrubbed yuppies sprung straight to the headlines from a Mattel catalog.

They were jokingly known as Ken and Barbie.

Together, their abduction-murder victims included at least two teenage girls, both strangled with an electrical cord, plus Karla’s own little sister, Tammy, whom Bernardo had demanded as a Christmas 1990 “gift.”

Karla obliged him, providing the Halcion with which Tammy was surreptitiously sedated in her parents’ basement on Christmas Eve. Karla also brought from her job at a veterinary clinic a liquid anesthetic for animals, which she poured into a cloth and held over her sleeping sister’s mouth. Karla looked on as Bernardo raped the comatose teen, while the rest of the Homolka family slept upstairs.

Later that Christmas Eve, Tammy drowned in her own vomit.

Bernardo’s secret videos of the assaults included scenes of Karla performing, at Paul’s direction, various sexual acts on the victims, including oral and digital sex on her unconscious sister.

To a horror-struck public, it seemed as if some gigantic disconnect had occurred. Karla and Paul were as unlikely-looking a pair of deviant felons as Ted Bundy had been a serial sex killer.

To Hazelwood, however, Paul Bernardo was a textbook sexual sadist.

Of the thirteen blitz-style sexual assaults he later admitted committing as the so-called Scarborough Rapist, the first occurred about five months before he met Karla Homolka. Bernardo at the time was living with his parents in Scarborough, a blue-collar Toronto suburb of strip malls and car dealerships, known in tonier sections of the city as Scarberia.

Bernardo was about to graduate with an accounting degree from the local campus of Toronto University. He also was a small-potato scam artist, a member of a gang who stole and peddled hot computers and other big-ticket consumer items.

At about 1:00 a.m. on May 4,1987 (coincidentally, Karla’s birthday), the handsome twenty-three-year-old Bernardo followed a twenty-one-year-old woman from her bus stop to her front lawn in Scarborough. There, Bernardo threw the girl to the ground and raped her both vaginally and anally. He also pummeled the victim’s face, arms, and breasts.

Nine days later, in similar circumstances in the same community and using the same bus stop MO, Bernardo attacked a nineteen-year-old female, beating her with his fists and dragging her into her backyard, where he bound the young woman’s wrists and lashed her by her neck to a fence, using her belt. This time, he also produced a knife, and said he’d slit her throat if she made a sound.

As far as is known, Bernardo did not strike out again as the
Scarborough Rapist until December 1987. In the meantime—mid-October—he met seventeen-year-old Karla Homolka, a high school senior from St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, who was visiting Toronto with a girlfriend.

Bernardo was trolling for girls with a buddy when he encountered Homolka in a Howard Johnson hotel restaurant. Within an hour they were in bed together in her room, heedless of her girlfriend and his male friend, sitting only a few uncomfortable feet away.

Later, those who believed that Karla, like Paul, should spend the rest of her life in prison, argued that a relationship so instantly and intensely sexual suggested to them that the comely schoolgirl from St. Catharines had a wanton side, and was far less a victim, and much more a willing victimizer, than she appeared.

Karla, who had a reputation among her friends as a free spirit before meeting Bernardo, seemed awestruck by him, they said, overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to resist him. The transformation was abrupt and dramatic and complete.

Among the explanations advanced for her behavior was that Karla was sexually excited by the menace she sensed in Paul.

John Money, a Johns Hopkins University sex researcher, describes such a paraphilia, which he calls “hybristophilia” in his book
Love Maps.

According to Money, the hybristophile (from the Greek,
hybrizein,
“to commit an outrage against someone,” plus
philia)
is sexually aroused by the knowledge her partner has committed a violent act, such as rape or murder or bank robbery.

Money says one of the purest expressions of hybristophilia is actress Faye Dunaway’s behavior as outlaw Bonnie Parker in the opening scenes of the movie
Bonnie and Clyde.

As Dunaway plays her, the libidinous Parker joins the
handsome Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow on a bank robbery and subsequent car chase. Parker is so erotically stimulated by the gunplay and danger that she impulsively gropes Barrow, and attempts to disrobe the surprised outlaw in the front seat of their stolen getaway car.

As Money explains it, the hybristophile’s behavior is not compliant, but collusive. “Compliancy means you follow instructions,” he says. “Collusion means you fit yourself in to become the other person’s counterpart.”

By late 1987, Karla was seeing Paul almost every weekend, and spending as much as two hundred dollars a month on telephone calls to him from her parents’ house in St. Catharines. Karla decorated her bedroom mirror with Paul’s photos, and doodled his name in her high school notebooks. Paul also called Karla nearly daily, sent flowers, and took the schoolgirl to expensive restaurants on weekends.

On December 16, 1987, the Scarborough Rapist attacked his third known victim, a fifteen-year-old girl, at about 8:30 p.m. as she was walking home from her bus stop.

“It was a repetition of the other attacks involving vaginal and anal intercourse while the victim’s head was pushed into the ground,” wrote retired Canadian appeals judge Patrick T. Galligan in his subsequent review of the case.

He ran his knife along the victim’s back, then grabbed her by the hair and pounded her head against the ground. He forced her to perform fellatio, then to lick his penis and say that she loved it. He made her wish his penis a Merry Christmas. The assault lasted an hour. . . . Medical examination disclosed a torn hymen, two tears in her anus, plus a number of abrasions on other parts of her body.

Throughout 1988, Bernardo continued his periodic sexual assaults as the Scarborough Rapist, while gradually metamorphosing, according to Karla Homolka’s later account,
from her caring and attentive lover into a cruel and violent master.

Soon after Christmas 1987, Judge Galligan reports,

[h]is treatment of her began to change subtly and very gradually. . . . He began telling her what to wear and how to style her hair. He told her where she could go, and where she could not go. He began to encourage her to disassociate herself from her friends because they were immature and stupid. He began encouraging her to drink more and more alcohol.

The judge recounts in some detail how Bernardo began insisting on fellatio, then anal sex, by late spring 1988. Karla obliged him. Also to please Bernardo, she wore a dog collar during sex and would repeat at his direction: “My name is Karla. I am seventeen years old. I am your little cocksucker. I am your little cunt. I am your little slut.”

As he progressively reduced the once-lively Homolka into an obedient sex chattel, Bernardo also intensified the violence he inflicted as the Scarborough Rapist. By autumn 1988, he’d committed at least eight rapes. In November, stumped Metro Toronto police detectives sent the Scarborough Rapist file to the BSU, where newly arrived agent Gregg McCrary was assigned to do the profile.

When it was completed, McCrary and then unit chief John Douglas traveled together to Toronto as a team to consult with local authorities. Roy did not directly assist in their analysis, or in the police investigation.

McCrary correctly pegged the UNSUB’s age as early twenties, and was accurate as well in surmising that the Scarborough Rapist lived at home with his parents. He also believed that the violence would lead inexorably to murder.

It did, although in retrospect Bernardo’s depredations could have been curtailed. After a composite sketch of the Scarborough Rapist was published in Toronto in late May
1990, a female acquaintance tipped the Metro police that Paul Bernardo bore a close resemblance to the drawing.

In November, Bernardo was interviewed by the police, and voluntarily provided samples of saliva, blood, and hair for DNA fingerprinting. Not until February 1993, however, were the police informed by the Toronto Center of Forensic Sciences that Bernardo and the Scarborough Rapist were one and the same person.

In an official review of the Bernardo investigation, Ontario justice Archie Campbell pointed out that had the collected specimens been tested within ninety days as they should have, “it is clear these rapes and murders could have been prevented.”

Certainly Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French might have been spared.

On June 15, 1991, Bernardo abducted the fourteen-year-old Mahaffy and took her to the Port Dalhousie house he shared with Homolka. Both Paul and Karla sexually assaulted the teen. Bernardo then strangled Mahaffy.

The next day in his basement workshop, Paul dismembered Leslie and partially encased her severed remains in molds of Kwik Mix concrete. He then enlisted Karla’s assistance in disposing of the weighted parts in Lake Gibson, near the Homolka family residence in St. Catharines.

Canoeists discovered Bernardo’s grisly handiwork on Saturday, June 29. On the same day just a few miles away, Paul and Karla were married in the village of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

On Thursday afternoon, April 16, 1992, Ken and Barbie kidnapped fifteen-year-old Kristen French from a church school parking lot, and drove her to their house at 57 Bayview Drive in Port Dalhousie, just as Paul had brought Leslie Mahaffy home.

The girl was kept for four days and subjected to a marathon of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse before Bernardo strangled her. Karla bathed and douched Kristen’s broken body. Then she and Paul drove in the night to nearby
Burlington, Ontario, where they dumped Kristen along a roadside drainage ditch not far from where Leslie Mahaffy was buried.

“He told me that he decided that he wanted to put the body in Burlington close to where Leslie was buried,” Karla later testified, “because he wanted to confuse the police into believing the killer came from Burlington.”

Fearing finally for her own life, Karla Homolka broke away from Paul Bernardo in January 1993 and went to the authorities with her story. A plea bargain was arranged. Karla would testify against Paul, and would serve two concurrent twelve-year sentences for manslaughter. One explicitly worded condition of the agreement firmly prohibits Homolka from discussing her case with the media on pain of having the deal revoked.

Paul Bernardo was arrested in February 1993.

Since there was almost nothing to tie Bernardo to the three homicides except for Homolka’s testimony, the police realized that their search of the house in Port Dalhousie would be critical to uncovering whatever physical evidence of the murders might remain. And since any items seized in such searches generally must be specified in the warrant itself—or they can’t be used in court against the defendant—the local authorities wanted expert advice on the types of physical evidence that sexual sadists might keep around the house.

They again contacted Gregg McCrary, who recommended to the Canadians’ attention “The Sexually Sadistic Criminal and His Offenses,” a report on the survey of thirty criminal sexual sadists Roy had undertaken with Dr. Dietz and Janet Warren of the Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.

One of the study’s key findings was how meticulously some sexual sadists maintain records.

Of the thirty sadistic offenders included in the survey, more than half kept records of their crimes as a means of
reliving them. “Although some have shared these records with crime partners,” wrote Hazelwood and his coauthors, “they are otherwise their most secret possessions, intended to be seen by no one else.”

Easily the cleverest of the record-keeping sexual sadists Hazelwood studied was Gerard John Schaefer, a onetime Florida policeman suspected of at least twenty-nine gruesome slayings. The Florida newspapers called him the “Sex Beast.”

Schaefer wrote that he kidnapped hitchhikers, whom he drove to remote, selected locations deep within the Florida swamps. There, he’d set up a stepladder under a tree limb, and direct the girls and women at gunpoint to mount the ladder, nude. In this humiliating posture, they were told to drink beer and urinate, which Schaefer enjoyed watching.

(Paul Bernardo videotaped his victims as they urinated, too.)

Shaefer placed a noose over the victim’s neck, threw the rope over the tree limb, attached the other end to his car’s front bumper, put the vehicle in reverse, and backed away slowly until the noose lifted the woman from the ladder and she was hanged to death.

He’d have sex with her dead body, then bury her nearby. He’d also repeatedly return to the scene, disinter the victim, and have sex with her corpse.

Schaefer’s innovative scheme for capturing the experience, and legally protecting his record of it, began with a visit to a psychiatrist. He confided to the doctor he was having horrible fantasies of hanging women and then having sex with them. As Schaefer hoped, the doctor decided it would be therapeutic if he wrote out his fantasies, which he delightedly did in detail.

The resulting documents—later discovered in his possessions—richly recounted Schaefer’s deviant adventures, but were covered by doctor-patient confidentiality. With one exception they could never be used as legal evidence against
him. Schaefer, who went to prison for a noncapital shooting homicide, was murdered there by another inmate.