Killer Couples (6 page)

At the end of that day, by the time the radiant bride and her handsome groom had finished their turn around the Niagara hotel grounds in their white horse-drawn carriage and Karla’s mother had been congratulated for the hundredth time on how beautiful her daughter looked, and what good fortune she’d had to find a man like Paul, another seven similar blocks had been pulled out of the murky waters. Each one would be found to contain separate body parts: Leslie Mahaffy was back on dry land.

If Karla and Paul had any momentary twinges of remorse for what they’d done or any nagging worries about being found out, they certainly weren’t giving any signs of this as they lived it up on their honeymoon in Hawaii. Fellow holidaymakers gazed over at them with a mixture of envy and goodwill. They were so young and attractive, and so obviously in love. These days, of course, you couldn’t bet on any marriage outlasting the wedding cake, but there was something about Paul and Karla that made onlookers feel their union would be one of the exceptions. They seemed so well matched, so comfortable together.

Watching Paul and Karla strolling together along the beach, hand in hand, twin fair-haired heads lit up by the sun, no one would have believed that Paul had just made a momentous announcement to Karla, one that would have shocked any other bride into packing her suitcase and fleeing onto the next plane back. He had revealed that he was the Scarborough Rapist.

All the time Paul and Karla were together, right up until they moved into their new home in St Catherine’s, Paul had continued his raping spree, causing a wave of fear and panic
among women in his locality. So widespread was the terror that the transport company even ordered bus drivers to drop their female passengers as near to their homes as possible in order to foil any attacker targetting the bus stops.

Of course, Paul Bernardo just loved that. The idea that a whole town was afraid to go out after dark because of him just played right up to his megalomaniac fantasies. He was
all-powerful
, he was the King… everyone was in thrall to him, and no one, but no one, would ever catch him.

Not that the police hadn’t come close a couple of times. The drawing-up of a composite picture based on descriptions given by several of the rape victims had led to a flurry of positive identifications. Luckily, hundreds of other men who also fitted the bill had been similarly reported in by ex-wives, girlfriends and neighbours all doing the right thing.

When police, acting on a tip-off from the public, had interviewed Bernardo in November 1990, they’d been unable to reconcile this polite, quietly spoken man, soon to be married to a gorgeous young blonde, with the image they had of the brutal beast who’d ripped apart so many women’s lives. He’d readily agreed to give them samples of body fluid, realising perhaps that, as one of hundreds interviewed, they were unlikely to be processed for a very long time, if at all. To the interviewing officers, the amenable, charming Bernardo certainly didn’t seem like a man with anything to hide. As he predicted, his samples were caught up in a backlog and remained indefinitely on file.

Back from honeymoon, the new Mr and Mrs Bernardo were
shocked to hear the news that a young girl’s body parts had been found in Lake Gibson. Well, that wasn’t surprising: everyone in that generally quiet, safe area was appalled.

‘You should have known about the tides – you’ve lived here all your life!’ Paul raged at Karla.

Typical! Every little thing that went wrong turned out to be her fault. Karla was getting so fed up with it all… Tired of always walking on eggshells around Paul, fed up with always getting the blame and with his ever-more frequent and violent beatings. It was getting so that she didn’t dare say or do anything without Paul’s say-so just in case she got it wrong. Karla loved the swanky house and the lifestyle she and Paul enjoyed, and she still loved Paul in the kind of way that an alcoholic loves the booze that’s killing them, but sometimes she wished they could be a normal couple, just like everyone else.

But normal was anathema to Paul Bernardo. By this stage he’d committed numerous rapes, had drugged women, tortured them and even murdered them. Still no one suspected a thing. That meant he was above the laws of ordinary men – he was untouchable. He was, as he kept telling the women he brutalised, the King.

And the King wasn’t to be content for long with just replaying the Leslie and Tammy video tapes. Within months, Bernardo was restless again. As usual it was Karla’s fault. If she had been enough for a man like him, he wouldn’t constantly need more. Once again, the couple brought Jane out to ‘play’, cosying up to the flattered teenager, making her feel special… But all the time
they were being so ‘nice’ to her, Paul was touching her inappropriately or pestering her to have sex with him. When the reluctant and confused girl looked to Karla for help, the older woman would make light of it, or tell Jane what a wonderful guy Paul was, and suggest how she wouldn’t mind sharing him. Poor Jane, still ignorant of having been used by the couple before while unconscious, put up with a certain amount of mauling, just so she could stay being friends with Karla whom she still idolised. But she drew the line at sexual intercourse. After all, she was still a virgin – or so she thought.

As Mr and Mrs Paul Bernardo’s marriage entered its second year, a few things were gradually changing. More frequently, the young Mrs Bernardo was turning up for work with bags under her eyes, as though she’d had trouble sleeping. Sometimes she also had bruises on her arms, which she explained away by having rough-housed with her dog, Buddy. When questioned, Karla still went to great lengths to tell people just how great her marriage was, and how lucky she was to have found Paul. Visitors to the couple’s home, who stumbled across any of the love notes Karla wrote to her husband on an almost daily basis, would wonder at the intensity of feeling the newly-weds seemed to share, even five years after first getting together. But then that was Karla Homolka for you: everything was about putting up a good façade, creating a golden impression other people would envy. It was almost as if she couldn’t enjoy her life and the things she had except by seeing the reflection of it in other people’s covetous eyes.

Her young, bleached-blond husband was still making his lucrative cigarette smuggling trips across the border from the US. Clean-cut and well spoken, no one ever stopped him. And on the days when he wasn’t doing that, he was holed up in his ‘music room’ working on the rap songs he was convinced would one day make him famous. And in the evenings, when he prowled the streets in his gold-coloured Nissan, taking videos of women walking along, or sitting in restaurant windows, or when he followed them home and stood outside their windows masturbating as he watched them undress, still no one ever caught him.

Over in Scarborough, where Bernardo had given his blood sample back in 1990 as part of the search for the Scarborough Rapist, the investigation was progressing with agonising slowness. The lab had finally managed to test all the samples and the list of suspects had been whittled down to just five. Now all that remained was to do a full DNA test on all five samples. However, this was time consuming, and already the specialist lab had a backlog of other cases waiting to be tested. There was no way the results would be available for another six months at least. Without knowing it, fate had just bought Paul Bernardo more time and he wasn’t about to waste it…

Thursday, 16 April 1992 was the last school-day before the long Easter weekend. Like most of her classmates, 15-year-old Kristen French was in a buoyant mood as she set out on the short 15-minute walk home from school with three luxurious
days ahead of her to spend relaxing around the house with her family and dog, or out somewhere with her boyfriend Elton. True, the weather could have been a little better, but when you’re young and bright and popular, with the whole of life stretching out tantalisingly in front of you, and a bright, sunny future ahead, one dull drizzly day really doesn’t make any odds.

When a car pulled into the car park of a church along her route, Kristen really didn’t pay too much attention. The occupants, a young couple, both with blonde hair, seemed to be looking for something.

‘Excuse me,’ the woman called, winding down the passenger window. ‘We’re a bit lost. Could you help us?’

Kristen didn’t think twice. From an early age, the tall slim girl with the long brown hair and ready smile had been taught to be polite and helpful. And even though everyone in the area had been watchful recently after what happened to Leslie Mahaffy, it was broad daylight on quite a busy road. Besides, everyone knew the guy who did it would turn out to be some sinister creep, nothing like this attractive, well-dressed couple, who just happened to be lost and needing some guidance.

Kristin readily crossed over to where the young woman was already getting out of the car, smiling apologetically and clutching a map in her hand.

‘I’m so terrible with directions,’ she said, rolling her eyes in
self-mockery
. ‘If you could just point out the right way on the map…’

Kristen wouldn’t have noticed the man get out of the driver’s seat until he was right behind her, the point of his knife pressing
into her side. Within seconds, she’d been bundled into the car. The only evidence she’d ever been there was a torn fragment of map and a shoe that had come loose in the brief tussle and was left behind on the car-park tarmac.

Imagine the worst fear you have for your daughter, and now multiply that by a hundred, and you still won’t come near to the hell Kristen French went through over the next three days. While her distraught family made televised appeals for her safe return, just a few minutes’ drive away, Kristen was fighting for her life as Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka’s sex slave.

As the video camera rolled, the terrified schoolgirl was repeatedly raped and forced to participate in twisted X-rated role-plays, all choreographed and scripted by Bernardo.

‘I love you,’ she was made to say again and again, just as his previous rape victims had had to do.

‘You’re the master. You’re the most powerful man in the world.’

There was no humiliation Kristen didn’t have to endure. Bernardo urinated on his victim, he attempted to defecate on her, he filmed her endlessly on the toilet, and of course he filmed her being made to have sex with Karla. In one bizarre excerpt, he taped the two women in the bathroom chatting about perfume.

‘Just talk among yourselves, girls’ stuff,’ he demanded. As if Kristen might just be able to put aside the knowledge that she’d been abducted and was being held as a slave by a sexual sadist and his complicit wife to make small talk about scent!

But Paul Bernardo was fast losing his grip on reality. Twice
over the three days, he went off in the car to get a take-out meal to bring home to his ‘prize’, leaving Kristen tied up in a bedroom closet. Twice, Karla had a chance to free Kristen, and twice she turned a deaf ear to the girl’s desperate pleas.

That Karla Homolka was scared of her husband’s violent temper is in no doubt. That she had learned how doing everything he told her without protesting was the only way to avoid being his human punchbag is also on balance of probability true. But could you, no matter how great your fear, no matter how deeply you’d been conditioned to be obedient, imagine listening to a young girl crying for her parents and not be moved to help her? Could you hear her beg for her life, knowing what hell she’d just been through and having a very good idea of what was in store for her, and not set her free?

Of course you couldn’t. But Karla Homolka could. She knew she was heavily implicated in Leslie Mahaffy’s death and now in Kristen French’s abduction and rape. And what about the death of her own sister, Tammy? No, she simply had too much to lose to let Kristen go. And, lacking in any inbuilt moral compass, she simply didn’t feel the compulsion to do the right thing that most people are guided by. Instead, in thrall to her domineering husband and shallow enough to put herself first at all times, she stood by and did nothing.

That Saturday evening, Paul went out to get Swiss-style
take-out
chicken. Later that night, Kristen was dead. Once again, the once golden couple would later tell wildly diverging stories about how she died. Paul would claim that he’d come back from getting
the take-out to find Kristen dead, apparently having strangled herself on the cord round her neck during an altercation with Karla as she attempted to escape. Karla, meanwhile, would point the finger squarely at her husband, recalling how he’d pulled the electric cord tight around the young girl’s neck later that night after yet another videotaped rape, holding it for a full seven minutes to make sure she was dead.

Whatever the truth, one fact is irrefutable. As soon as Kristen French saw Paul and Karla’s faces, right at the outset in that church car park, her fate was sealed. The Bernardos knew they’d be facing life imprisonment if she was able to identify them. Kristen French would have to die. The only question was when – and how.

That Easter Sunday morning saw Paul and Karla Bernardo doing an extra zealous spring clean. Neighbours listening to them vacuuming the carpets, even in the car, approved of how nicely the couple were keeping their house. Some tenants thought that because a house was rented, you could treat it with disrespect and allow it to fall into complete disrepair, but luckily the Bernardos weren’t like that.

After meticulously cleaning the house and Kristen’s body, right down to chopping off her long brown hair and burning it in the fireplace in case it would show up any carpet fibres, Paul and Karla set off for lunch at her parents’ house.

‘It’ll be a great alibi,’ she assured him.

Besides, it would take her mind off the whole thing with Kristen. Over her years with Paul, Karla had become quite adept
at compartmentalising her life so that when she was out with friends or family, or at work she could switch off from difficult events at home. A family meal would give her a break from having to think about the horrible thing they’d just done. For a few hours, she’d be able to be just Karla Homolka again, the cocky blonde princess who nearly always got what she wanted. In the company of her family, she could once more revert to being a child, the way she was before life got so complicated.