Crime Seen (16 page)

In the end it wouldn’t be a tip that broke the case. In January 1993, twenty-two-year-old Karla Homolka, whose co-workers and family disbelieved her story that her black-and-blue face had been the result of a car accident, was forced to contact police and report she had been the victim of a domestic assault. Her twenty-eight-year-old husband, Paul Bernardo, was arrested. This disclosure began a snowballing series of events that led to the arrest of both of them for the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French and numerous sexual assaults of others. No one could have imagined, not even we so-called expert profilers, that it would be this woman and her husband.

Homolka’s defence counsel entered into a plea bargain with the Crown attorney’s office that would come to be known as the “Deal with the Devil.” In consideration of the need to have her testify against her husband, and prior to having full knowledge of her involvement in the crimes, a deal was made that Homolka would plead guilty to her involvement in the crimes and serve only twelve years in prison.

The police, Crown attorneys and public would be continually shocked as each new piece of information of her husband’s criminal activity came to light, much of it videotaped, including:

• Bernardo was responsible for a series of brutal sexual assaults in the Toronto area that began in 1987, but he slipped through the cracks of a task force investigation;

• complicit with Homolka, Bernardo had sexually assaulted her fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy, who had been so heavily drugged that she died (at the time the death was ruled accidental);

• Bernardo stalked several women in St. Catharines and committed further sexual assaults there;

• Bernardo stalked, sexually assaulted and murdered Leslie Mahaffy; and

• complicit with Homolka, Bernardo stalked, sexually assaulted and murdered Kristen French

Ron MacKay and Toronto forensic psychiatrist Peter Collins worked extensively with the task force in setting up an interview strategy for the psychopathic sexual sadist and assisted in the preparation of the search warrant for his residence. Timing of the two events was critical. I was out of the country on vacation and had hoped to be back in time to help out, but the proverbial shit hit the fan when Bernardo’s name and his impending arrest were leaked to the press. All plans were accelerated and officers were not as prepared as they could have been to interview him or execute the search warrant on his home. This situation compromised almost all of the behaviourally based strategies that the guys had been working on.

Bernardo’s interview was not a success, as far as getting him to confess to the crimes, but a great deal of evidence was found in his house. After the police completed seventy-one days of searching and the warrant expired, Bernardo instructed his lawyer to search a location in the house that somehow had been missed. Videotapes were recovered that were eventually turned over to Vince and he was told, “I feel sorry for anyone who has to watch that.” The lawyer never would have spoken a truer word. The tapes contained recordings of the multiple victims of sexual sadistic assaults and torture. They also revealed the depth of Homolka’s previously undisclosed involvement in the crimes, but unfortunately the “Deal with the Devil” had already been made.

The FBI profile was fairly accurate, with inaccuracies accounted for by misinterpreting evidence or well-intentioned, but incorrect, eyewitness accounts. Homolka advised police that she and Bernardo had watched the television show and had even recorded it. Coincidentally, Gregg realized that he, along with John Douglas and Ron MacKay, who was at the time an FBI police fellow-in-training, had profiled seven of the Toronto-area sexual assaults dating back to 1987 and 1988.
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Prior to the start of Bernardo’s jury trial, Vince asked Ron MacKay, Peter Collins and me to consult with him and the Crown prosecutors regarding their trial strategy and how to introduce the videotaped evidence of Bernardo’s assaults on his victims. We provided the prosecution team with our opinions on presenting the evidence in court and how to cross-examine Bernardo when he testified on his own behalf. We knew a psychopath like him would insist on taking advantage of a grandstanding opportunity. We were in the court to watch the jury members’ faces during Bernardo’s pitiful attempts to explain and even justify his actions. After everything they had seen and heard during the trial, the twelve men and women on the jury were not about to be duped—they found him guilty of all the charges brought against him and he was jailed indefinitely as a dangerous offender.

After Bernardo’s trial was over there was a public outcry. People wanted to know how this serial predator and his accomplice spouse, who committed such a multitude of crimes throughout southern Ontario, could evade justice for over five years. In 1995 the Honourable Mr. Justice Archie Campbell of the Superior Court of Justice in Ontario led an inquiry into the serial sexual assault investigations in and around Toronto, the homicides in the St. Catharines area, as well as issues that were raised regarding Ontario’s forensic testing capacities and forensic pathology examinations. The government requested that he identify issues and make recommendations that would improve such investigations in the future.

I asked to appear before Justice Campbell to share information about an innovative investigative tool that I was already aware of that could increase the capacity of police to investigate these types of crimes. Since 1993 the computerized Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS) had been operating across Canada. Ron MacKay spearheaded the research and development of the program, similar to the FBI’s ViCAP program in the US, and consulted me in the process. Specialized analytical units were set up across the country. Police officers with specialized training analyzed submitted violent crime cases, such as homicides, sexual assaults and other violent crimes from across the country. Those cases with similar offender behaviour, description, victimology, geographic location and offence dynamics were flagged. The analysts then notified the submitting agencies of the potential links in their cases in an effort to track and identify serial offenders at the earliest possible opportunity. The ability existed to identify involved agencies so that they could pool their investigative and financial resources to work together on finding offenders. The OPP formed a small five-person ViCLAS who I helped train, and I consulted with them regularly.

Despite the ability to identify serial sex offenders and killers at the earliest opportunity, there was one huge problem that ViCLAS couldn’t wrestle to the ground: nobody was using it, including my own agency. Ron and I had made presentations on behalf of the program to chiefs of police across Ontario and they all agreed to support the program, however, ViCLAS was failing dismally with few criteria cases actually being submitted by their investigators. I suggested to Justice Campbell that he recommend the Ontario government make it mandatory that police agencies promptly submit crimes that fit the ViCLAS criteria. He agreed that if agencies involved in the investigation of Bernardo had had the system in place, and then used it throughout the investigation, linkages between many of these crimes would have been identified. Then agencies could have shared their resources and worked together to solve the crimes. Perhaps assault victims could have been spared their ordeal and even lives saved. We were too late for Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.

Several years later I was in Kingston for some meetings and was invited to take a tour of Kingston Penitentiary, often referred to as Canada’s Alcatraz. It was always an uncomfortable feeling for me to hand over my gun before entering a prison facility, especially when you knew that some of your former “clients” were inside and could be roaming about. I didn’t see any of mine until my last stop, the segregation unit. There was no roaming around in there. Everyone was on twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown in their one-and-a-half-by-three-metre cells. The cell bars were also covered with Plexiglas, apparently for the protection of loathed inmates, on the lowest rung of inmate hierarchy. I had just stepped inside the unit’s observation dome and was chatting with one of the guards when I glanced across the hall and saw Bernardo sitting on his bunk. I watched him for about five minutes, but he never looked over. He was watching a small portable television, constantly changing channels every few seconds with his TV remote. It felt good to see that a television was the only thing left in his life that he could control.

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The symbol of the “Green Ribbon of Hope” was later gifted from Holy Cross school and the French family to Child Find Canada as their national symbol of hope for all missing children.

BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCES SECTION

“In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.”

—Tina Fey,
Bossypants

IN 1994 I MOVED FROM TORONTO
to Orillia, about 130 kilometres to the north, where the OPP was building its new headquarters. Bob had transferred over from Toronto police to make the move with me and before long he was working in a new provincial anti-biker squad. We bought a large home just outside Orillia and, at Bob’s suggestion, my parents moved into the lower level. Not long after, Dad became ill with several different health issues, accompanied by an aggressive onset of dementia, and he died in January 1995. It was a sad time for our family, but I was glad to have been able to spend a lot of time together in the last months of his life.

I was working out of a retrofitted industrial warehouse in the west end of Orillia until my new office in headquarters was ready for me to move in. Again I was tucked back in the corner of a maze of CIB offices with my FBI graduation certificate hanging behind my desk and Mr. De Niro’s smiling face not too far away. But my “me” wall was filling up with other training certificates, plus I was collecting my own “attagirl” accolade plaques recognizing my assistance to their investigations. My allotment of one filing cabinet had long been filled and now even my office floor space was at a premium with overflowing boxes of case files, autopsy reports, photographs and anything else investigators wanted me to take a look at.

I’d barely settled into my chair one Monday morning when my phone rang. OPP Chief Superintendent Gerry Boose asked me to come to his office right away then hung up. The chief’s office was just down the hall from CIB so I didn’t have much time to consider what trouble I might be in.

Our meeting lasted all of two minutes. He said that the OPP was restructuring and they wanted to be ready for the anticipated recommendations coming out in the release of Justice Campbell’s “Bernardo Investigation Review.” Because of the success I’d had in profiling he wanted to form a new OPP section that would specialize in providing behavioural-oriented support services to criminal investigators across Ontario. He asked me what I thought. “Yes, sir,” I replied. “I think that is an excellent idea.” (Momma didn’t raise no fool, as the saying goes.) He asked me to put together a proposal for the new section and have it back to him as soon as possible. I had only one question. “Can I be the boss?” He replied, “You’d seem to be the logical choice, so yes.”

Being at the helm of the first Behavioural Sciences Section (BSS) in Canada when it opened for business in June 1995 was one of the highlights of my career. I wanted to stay actively involved in casework as well as run the section but needed help, so I hired Jim Van Allen as the OPP’s second criminal profiler. I’d done my homework on Jim, who had spent most of his career in northern Ontario. He possessed a strong criminal investigation background, had the reputation of being a risk taker with confidence, and his training and skills were very different from mine—a big reason why I wanted him on my team. Since the FBI no longer hosted the fellowship training program, I enrolled Jim in a new two-year understudy and accreditation program sponsored by the International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship (ICIAF), our profilers’ association. (Current ICIAF and FBI profilers, along with those retired and working for former BSU chief Roger Depue’s company, the Academy Group, provided classroom training and field study placements.)

I knew right away that one unit BSS could use was Polygraph because their talents went far beyond their technical expertise. Aside from being able to spot lies based on physiological responses to questions when suspects were hooked up to a polygraph, these guys knew how to talk to people, and were masters at breaking down defence mechanisms with their persuasive techniques. They’d been honing their own form of behavioural analysis skills when I was still running up and down the highway arresting drunks in Port Credit.

The fledgling ViCLAS Unit, still struggling to get off the ground, was another no-brainer for the team. I knew what they were capable of and was confident their caseload would soon be going through the roof. Sure enough, when Justice Campbell released his report a year later, not only were violent crime submissions made mandatory in Ontario’s Police Services Act, I also had a budget increase of over $4 million to set up an Ontario ViCLAS Centre. My staff of five grew to forty uniformed and civilian personnel.