The Female As Serial Killer Accomplice
There are no histories of female serial killers committing acts as brutal and as depraved as those they commit when they act as accomplices of male serial killers. Over a period of three years, Charlene Williams Gallego and her husband, Gerald Gallego, lured and kidnapped ten teenage girls from shopping malls, parking lots, and roadsides, taking them away in their van. Together they both raped and tortured the girls in a mutual, sadistic, sex slave fantasy, and when they were finished, as Charlene watched or waited in the van, Gerald would murder the girls and dump their bodies in remote fields and desert flats.
Karla Homolka drugged her 15-year-old younger sister and offered her as a “Christmas present” to her fiancé Paul Bernardo while her parents slept upstairs on Christmas Eve. She videotaped Bernardo as he raped her sister. She died during the assault from the effects of the sedatives Karla had slipped into her drink. Karla later videotaped and participated in the kidnappings, rapes, and murders of two more adolescent girls.
In her early twenties, Myra Hindley assisted her boyfriend, Ian Brady, in the rape and murder of perhaps as many as ten male and female children and adolescents, taking photographs of them and audiotaping their cries as Brady assaulted them. Rosemary and Fred West, Judith and Alvin Neelley, Carol Bundy and Doug Clark, Catherine and David Birnie, Cynthia Coffman and James Marlow, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, were all couples who together kidnapped, raped, and murdered numerous victims.
FEMALES AS ACCOMPLICES IN SEXUALLY SADISTIC SERIAL MURDERS
Of the sixty-two known female serial killers in the U.S. between 1800 and 1995, a third (33 percent) were acting as part of a team or a couple.198 In most cases, the female was only technically a killer by definition of law—she did not physically commit the actual murder, but participated in the crime by luring victims or assisting in their captivity, torturing, sexual assaulting, disposing of their bodies, or destroying evidence. In the majority of cases, the female serial killer’s accomplice was a male, who ostensibly dominated the female, although there are exceptions to this, as we shall see. There are also cases of exclusively female teams or lesbian couples and family teams or cult groups—three or more killers operating together, in which, often, the male once again figures as the dominant element.199 The Charles Manson “family” is probably the most notorious of modern-day killer cults to which young females belonged.
Female-male couples overall remain the most common serial-killing teams in the United States. It is in these teams that females approach most closely the stereotypical role of the sadistic, predatory, male sexual serial killer. Until most recently, female accomplices were almost exclusively treated as battered victims of their male partners and sentencing has often reflected this perception. While convicted male partners are sentenced to death or life imprisonment, their female accomplices are sometimes released after serving relatively shorter sentences—the cases of Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka are perhaps the most notorious examples of female killers successfully defending themselves by claiming to be submissive victims battered by their spouses into participating in horrendous crimes.
The focus on male dominance in this type of killing team is underscored by the fact that the male is almost always older than the female partner. He often has an extensive history as a solo sexual predator before he met the female. The female is, on average, younger (20 years old at the first murder) than typically solo female serial killers (average age 30).200 While the male accomplice might have accumulated a substantial criminal history prior to meeting the female, she often has no history of any substantial criminal activities prior to encountering the male. In fact, in the cases of Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka, both women had what might be described as a “normal” middle-class upbringing with no signs of any abuse, delinquency, or mental disorders in their histories.
Female-male team killers are usually highly organized, carefully planning their crimes and selecting their victims. Interestingly enough, their joint killing careers are often much shorter than the average for solo females: one year for couples compared to the four-year average for single female serial killers. Frequently, the apprehension of the couple can be attributed to disorganization or loss of control by the male partner. The male partner frequently “imprints” a typical sexual predatory profile on the crime—highly visible victims, public disposal of bodies, the use of knives and guns, rape and mutilation. This is not the typical pattern of the solo female serial killer, who kills “quietly” with poison or suffocation and whose victims frequently are not even recognized by authorities as having been murdered. What is frighteningly striking, however, is the extent and capacity of the female accomplice to journey into the male killing pattern.
Wives and Girlfriends of Sexual Sadists
How does an apparently normal female become a homicidal accomplice? There are few reliable studies on that question. In 2002, Janet Warren and veteran FBI profiler Ron Hazelwood published the results of interviews with twenty former wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists, seven of whom participated in the killing of a total of nineteen victims.201 Four of the women involved with murderers were actually present at the murder and were charged as accomplices and two can be easily identified as Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka, even thought the study does not identify the participants by their actual names.
Seventeen (85 percent) of the women in the survey were raised in an intact family and had no previous arrest histories prior to meeting their mates. The other three were arrested for minor charges: stealing a tube of lipstick at the age of fourteen, a typewriter from work, a check from work. Seventy-five percent of the women had graduated high school or had some college education and 50 percent were in either a skilled or professional labor category. Twenty percent were students at the time they met their partner. Only four of the women reported alcohol or drug abuse, suicide attempts, or mental health issues prior to their relationship with the sadist. The researchers concluded that the majority of these women “lived rather conventional, stable, and noncriminal lives, before the initiation of the relationship that culminated in rather radical changes in their behavior.”202
This is diametrically opposite to what we know of solo female serial killers, who tend to have unstable family histories, relatively poor academic performances, juvenile criminal records, and psychiatric histories.
Other aspects of their childhood histories, however, more closely resembled those of solo female serialists and male serial killers as well. Thirty-five percent of the women reported abusive family discipline, and nearly half (45 percent) reported continual sexual abuse in their childhood; 30 percent identified their father as the abuser when they were between the age of 4 and 8. The sexual abusers included fathers, brothers, a grandmother, an aunt, a sister, and other acquaintances. There were no cases of sexual assault by strangers reported.
When asked why they became involved in abusive and sadistic relationships, 75 percent of the women replied that it was out of love and desire to please the man. Two women described themselves as extremely naïve, two indicated that they wanted to get away from home, and one could offer no explanation.
The majority of women (85 percent) stated that the men were gentle and caring when they first met them, gave them surprise gifts (65 percent), took them on trips (40 percent), and had a “great deal of money to spend on them” (85 percent). When asked why they remained in the relationship, only three of the twenty women attributed it to love; eight said they were either naïve or stupid and hoped their partner’s behavior would improve; one for financial dependency and one for emotional dependency. Only seven women reported they remained out of fear of their partner. Asked why they left the relationship, eight said out of fear for their lives; three out of fear for their children’s lives; three because their partners were arrested; five for other reasons; and one was left by her partner. Fear appeared to be almost equally (35–40 percent) the motive in a large minority of cases why the women either remained or left the relationships.
The authors of the study characterized these women as “compliant.” They concluded that while all the women “express a willingness to exchange their compliance in return for the attention and affection of the sadistic male, there also appears to be a more subtle dynamic operative in which some of the women became assimilated into the sexual aggression of their partner.” They believed that all of the women who engaged in this type of behavior did so only after meeting their partner, and in those cases where the women participated in murder, they would not have done so on their own, independent of the men. Alternatively, the authors felt the males would have murdered even if they had not met their female partner—at least in those seven cases out of the twenty.
Finally, the study concluded:
It is also our opinion that these men and their behaviors do not reflect the more extreme end of the continuum of behavior associated with “wife batterers.” Although some men who batter their wives may also be sexual sadists, it is our impression that the majority of them are not.203
High-Dominance Women
During the mid-1930s, American psychologist Abraham Maslow undertook a number of studies of sexual behavior related to dominance. He noted that in captivity, the most dominant monkeys engaged in almost constant sex, and that the nature of that sex was often “abnormal”—male monkeys mounting other males and even instances of dominant females mounting males. Maslow concluded that sex in those circumstances was often an expression of dominance, rather than the primates’ sex drive. He also noted that when a new monkey was introduced into the group, the lower-dominance monkeys would act extremely violent toward it. Maslow linked these attacks to low-esteem violence of the type seen in human beings.
Maslow then turned his attention to young college girls, whom he interviewed at great length. In 1939, Maslow concluded that female sexuality is also linked to dominance. He found that people fall into one of three categories: high-dominance, medium-dominance, and low-dominance.
High-dominance women were more promiscuous, sexually adventurous, and uninhibited. Medium-dominance women tended to also be very sexual, but would usually relate to one male partner at a time. Low-dominance women had a very low opinion of sex, engaged in it infrequently, and felt its only purpose was for reproduction. Maslow noted that the sexual characteristics of each category had nothing to do with sexual desire—while the sex drive was equal in each type, the amount of sex that the women actually engaged in would differ.
Maslow also discovered that women preferred males who were slightly more dominant than themselves but within the same dominance group. High dominance women rejected most males because of their lower dominance. One woman, who claimed that she could orgasm by simply looking at an attractive male, explained to Maslow that she couldn’t orgasm when having sex with some males because they were too weak and she could not imagine herself “giving in to them.”
Medium-dominance women found high-dominance men too frightening, while low-dominance women found the medium-dominance man intimidating. Each would mate with slightly more dominant men, but from within their dominance class. For Maslow, this was the normal course of male-female relationships. It is often applicable to homosexual relationships as well.
In certain situations, however, partners from different dominance groups mate, and a very severe dynamic emerges in the relationship. The reason that such mating occurs is usually some type of emotional disorder that leads an individual to seek a mate from a different dominance class. High-dominance individuals with personality disorders, needing to sadistically dominate their mate, may seek out partners in lower-dominance categories. While lower-dominance individuals, also suffering with personality disorders, compelled perhaps to act out an abusive scenario, may seek out higher-category mates. Often the result is a slavelike, almost hypnotic relationship between the two parties, where one partner totally dominates the other, yet both are desperately dependent upon each other. Sometimes, the one vital element that a dominant partner lacks in order to unleash homicidal fantasies is provided by the submissive partner.
Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez—the Honeymoon Killers
Ironically, the first case study offered here of a serial killer male-female couple defies the norms described above to some extent as it appears that the female in this team might have been the dominant figure in a relationship in which the male thought he was the dominant.
Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, the so-called “Lonely Hearts Killers” of the late 1940s, became the subject of a 1970 cult film, The Honeymoon Killers, written and directed by American composer, pianist, film writer, and director Leonard Kastle. Just completed at this writing is a new movie about them, Lonely Hearts, starring Salma Hayek, John Travolta, and James Gandolfini.
Martha Beck was born as Martha Julie Seabrook in Milton, Florida, in 1919. Her father was the editor of a local newspaper, but he abandoned the family when Martha was an infant. Martha suffered from a childhood glandular disorder, which caused her to mature so rapidly that by the age of ten she had an adult’s body and sexual drive. Along with that came a weight problem, typical in the childhoods of so many female serial killers.
During her murder trial in 1951, Martha stated that she had been raped when she was 13 years old. When she told her mother about the rape, her mother beat her and subsequently kept a close watch on her, chasing away any boys that came close to her. At school, the overweight girl was ridiculed and scorned. She had no friends and withdrew into her own reclusive world of fantasy and romance, and perhaps darker fantasies as well.
Martha was a clever girl, and at the age of 23 she graduated first in her class from a nursing school in Pensacola in 1942. Despite her academic credentials, her excessive weight made it impossible for her to find employment as a nurse. The only work her nursing credentials got her on graduation was working in a funeral home preparing female bodies for burial. At her trial, she would later say of that period, “In a bizarre fashion, I was learning something about disconnecting through my observation of death.”
Lonely Hearts
With the war, however, Martha managed to find work as a nurse in a military hospital in California. There she led a lonely, sexually promiscuous life, picking up soldiers and sailors on leave for casual sex. In 1944, she became pregnant. When Martha approached the father of her child about marrying her, he instead committed suicide.
The pregnant Martha returned to Milton, claiming that she had married a naval officer. She even had a ring to prove it. But shortly before the birth of the child, Martha sent herself a telegram announcing that her husband had been killed in action in the Pacific. The small town mourned for her loss and her story was featured in the local press.
Soon Martha was pregnant again by a Pensacola bus driver named Alfred Beck. He married her, but they were divorced after six months. Weighing 250 pounds at this time, a single mother with two children, Martha settled into a lonely life fed by the true romance and confession magazines of the period. She was employed as a pediatric nurse at a Pensacola hospital, where her excellent performance eventually led her to a series of promotions, culminating with her appointment as the hospital’s Chief of Nurses.
In 1947, as a cruel joke, some members of the staff who worked under Martha’s supervision sent her an ad to join a lonely hearts club—Mother Dinene’s Family Club for Lonely Hearts. Before the age of Internet dating, hundreds of agencies provided services for lonely single people to correspond with each other by mail in search of marriage, love, or companionship. Unperturbed by the joke, Martha placed an ad with the club. She made no mention of her weight or the existence of her two children.
In the weeks that followed, Martha did not get a single response to her ad. She had almost forgotten about it when suddenly, just before Christmas, she received a response from a club member, 33-year-old Raymond Martinez Fernandez. Raymond wrote that he was a successful businessman of Spanish origins in the import-export business and that he lived in New York City on West 139th Street “here in this apartment much too large for a bachelor but I hope someday to share it with a wife.” Fernandez wrote that he chose to correspond with Martha because she was a nurse and he knew that she would have “a full heart with a great capacity for comfort and love.”
For several weeks, Martha and Raymond carried on a passionate correspondence. Martha sent Raymond pictures of herself in group photographs where the bulk of her body was hidden behind other nurses. She purchased expensive stationery and sprayed her correspondence with perfume; she carried her letters from Fernandez with her everywhere she went. The letters Fernandez wrote in a fine handwriting were refined and romantic, full of literary references. Finally, Fernandez made the most romantic request that Martha could imagine: Would she send him a lock of her hair? The starry-eyed Martha obliged.
Martha, unfortunately, had no way of knowing that Fernandez did not want her hair for a romantic keepsake, but as part of an occult voodoo ritual, which he believed would enslave her in a bondage of love. Fernandez was a full-fledged nut job!
Raymond Martinez Fernandez—the Voodoo Spy
Born on December 17, 1914, in Hawaii, Raymond Martinez Fernandez was indeed of Spanish descent. When he was 3, his family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Fernandez grew up. He was a frail and gentle child, but he grew to be a well-built and handsome young man. When he was 18 he went to live with his uncle in Spain and there he married a local woman and they had a son. During the Second World War he served in the Spanish merchant fleet and spied for British intelligence.
After the war, in late 1945, Fernandez decided to return to the U.S. to seek work and then send for his wife and two children. He secured work on a freighter bound for the Dutch West Indies. But during the voyage he had a horrific accident—a heavy steel hatch smashed shut on his head with such force that it caused an indentation in his skull and irreversible brain damage. Fernandez was hospitalized from December 1945 until March 1946.
When Fernandez emerged from the hospital, his personality had been completely altered. He was distant and moody and quick to anger. He also lost his hair around the region of his injury, where there was an indented scar on his head. He soon took to wearing a wig to cover it. On his journey to the U.S., Fernandez inexplicably stole a quantity of clothing and items from the ship’s storeroom. They were discovered by customs upon his arrival and Fernandez ended up serving a one-year prison sentence in Tallahassee Florida. He cellmate was a practitioner of a fringe type of voodoo and introduced Fernandez to the practice.
Fernandez became convinced that voodoo rituals would give him power over women. Plagued by headaches and violent mood swings, Fernandez began corresponding with women through lonely hearts clubs, always asking for a lock of their hair with which he would conduct a ritual. He would seduce dozens of women, gain their trust, and steal their money, jewelry, and anything else he could lay his hands on. The victims were too embarrassed or ashamed to complain.
The apartment in New York belonged to one of Fernandez’s victims—one that had ended up dead. Jane Lucilla Thompson was a wealthy divorcee who began corresponding with Fernandez in 1947. The two met and had a whirlwind romance. In October 1947, Thompson purchased tickets for them to go on a cruise to Spain. In Spain, Fernandez introduced Thompson to his Spanish wife and the three were seen frequently dining together in the town, although what they knew about each other is unknown. On October 7, 1947, some kind of argument occurred in their hotel room, and Thompson was found dead in her room the next morning, apparently from a drug overdose.
Fernandez, in the meantime, returned to New York with a forged will and took possession of Thompson’s apartment, ejecting her widowed mother from the premises. Within weeks, he had established correspondence with dozens of lonely-hearts club women, including Martha Beck.
Having performed his voodoo ritual with Martha’s lock of hair, Fernandez took the train down to Pensacola on December 28 to meet his intended next victim. Fernandez had assumed that Martha, as a chief nurse, would have money to steal.
If Fernandez was surprised by Martha’s appearance upon meeting her at the train station, he did not show it. Martha was pleased with Fernandez’s good looks. She took him home and introduced him to her two children. She made dinner that night. After the kids were put to bed, convinced of his voodoo power over Martha, Fernandez made sexual advances toward her. Who really seduced whom is debatable, but for the next day and night they stayed together. At some point, Fernandez must have realized that Martha had nothing of worth to steal; he announced that he needed to return to New York.
Martha had other plans. She professed her undying love to Fernandez and hysterically demanded that he remain in Florida to marry her. Fernandez, no doubt convinced of his own frightening voodoo power, barely managed to extricate himself from Martha’s grip by promising to return for her or send her money so she could join him in New York. Martha took this as a proposal of marriage.
While Fernandez was hightailing it back to New York City, Martha was telling everybody in town she was engaged to be married. She even threw herself a bridal shower. Fernandez attempted to break things off with Martha, but she threatened suicide. Fernandez relented and allowed her to visit him in New York for two weeks. Upon her return from her visit, Martha was fired from the hospital—probably because she left her job without permission. There was nothing holding her in Florida.
On January 18, 1948, Martha returned to New York, but this time with her two children and her suitcases. She showed up unannounced at Fernandez’s door. Fernandez appreciated Martha’s slavish attention to all his needs, from feeding to sex, but he told her he wanted her to get rid of her kids. Without much hesitation, Martha abandoned her children at a Salvation Army hostel on January 25, 1948. She never gave them another thought.
“In the History of the World, How Many Crimes Have Been Attributed to Love?”
Raymond confessed his lonely hearts cons to Martha, who had no objection. She saw it as “her duty” to assist him, and together they read through all the lonely hearts mail to pick a suitable victim for Fernandez. On February 28, 1948, Fernandez married a retired schoolteacher from Pennsylvania he had been corresponding with and brought her back to the apartment in New York. Martha posed as Raymond’s sister-in-law from a previous marriage. The schoolteacher eventually heard rumors about the death of Fernandez’s “wife” in Spain, and after Fernandez began to berate her for failing to sign over to him her teacher’s pension and insurance policies, she returned home, minus her car and a large sum of cash Fernandez appropriated from her.
On August 14, 1948, after marrying and robbing several other women, Fernandez married Myrtle Young from Arkansas, a woman who was younger and more active than the previous victims. This time, Martha posed as Fernandez’s sister, but she was so jealous at the possibility of Raymond having sex with his latest lonely hearts bride that she insisted on sleeping in the same bed with the newlywed couple—between them! After a few days of this wackiness, Myrtle began to protest, at which point Martha insisted that he render her unconscious with some sedatives. They then carried the unconscious Myrtle to the bus station and sent her back to Arkansas asleep on the bus, after relieving her of four thousand dollars in cash. Unfortunately, they miscalculated the dosage, and Myrtle died upon her arrival in Little Rock.
Martha and Raymond continued with their scam, but failed for a long time to find any suitable victims. Martha would veto any victim she thought was still young enough to have sex with Fernandez. The couple’s money had almost run out when they finally hit upon Janet Fay, a 66-year-old widow in Albany, New York.
Janet Fay was a wealthy woman with a large apartment in the center of Albany and money in the bank. She was a pious Catholic so Fernandez took care to make lots of religious references in his correspondence. On December 30, 1948, Martha and Raymond arrived in Albany. Fernandez introduced Martha as his sister and soon Janet allowed the two of them to stay with her in the apartments. It took Fernandez approximately five days to convince Janet to marry him, clear out her account of six thousand dollars in cash, and agree to go to live with him and Martha in an apartment they had already rented in Long Island. By January 4, 1949, they had arrived by car at the apartment.
What happened after dinner that night is unclear. Apparently Martha walked into the bedroom and saw Janet naked with her arms around Fernandez. She flew into a rage. Janet challenged Martha’s right to walk in on them in that matter and began to yell. According to Martha, Fernandez told her, “Keep this woman quiet. I don’t care what you do! Just keep her quiet!”
Janet was bludgeoned into unconsciousness with a ball-peen hammer and then strangled using a scarf. According to Martha’s testimony, she blacked out and does not recall who did what. Martha and Fernandez then wrapped Janet’s body in towels and sheets, stuffed it into a closet, and went to sleep.
The next day they bought a trunk and dumped the body inside, storing it at Fernandez’s sister’s home. They rented a house, then retrieved the trunk and buried it under a layer of cement in the basement of the home. They cashed Janet’s checks and typed letters to her family, declaring her happiness and announcing plans to go to Florida. The only problem was that Janet Fay did not type or own a typewriter, and suspicious relatives notified police.
But Beck and Fernandez were already on the move, having lined up their next victim in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Fernandez was corresponding with a 48-year-old widow named Delphine Downing, who had a 2-year-old daughter, Rainelle. When Raymond wrote to her near the end of January that he was going to be passing through Grand Rapids on business with his sister, Delphine responded that she was looking forward to meeting them both in person.
Delphine was so impressed with Fernandez’s courteous ways and considerate manner with her daughter that before the month was out she was having sex with him. Martha, in the meantime observing all this, was seething in a jealous rage. But one morning, Delphine accidentally walked into the bathroom to discover Fernandez without his wig, exposing his baldness and horrific scar. She became hysterical and accused Raymond of deceiving her. To calm her down, Martha convinced her to take some sedatives. But while she was unconscious, her daughter, Rainelle, began to cry. Martha grabbed the child and choked her into silence, leaving her throat badly bruised.
Fernandez was upset, fearing that when Delphine woke up she’d find the bruises on her daughter’s throat and call the police. Apparently, Martha ordered Fernandez to “do something.”
Fernandez took Delphine’s former husband’s handgun and after wrapping it in a blanket to muffle the sound, he shot Delphine once in the head as her daughter looked on. Martha and Raymond then wrapped her body in some sheets and buried her in the cellar of her home. Later they covered the hole with a layer of cement.
For two days they prepared for their escape, cashing Delphine’s checks and looting her house of property as the 2-year-old Rainelle cried for her mother nonstop. When Martha could no longer stand the girl’s crying, she drowned her in a tub of dirty water in the basement. Raymond dug another hole for the child.
After the murder of Rainelle, instead of leaving town Martha and Raymond went to the movies. Shortly after they returned to the house that evening, police showed up at the door, having been called by suspicious neighbors. They were arrested on February 28, 1949, and quickly confessed to their crimes because they were convinced that, since Michigan had no death penalty, if they confessed they would serve a maximum of six years.
To their shock, in March 1949 they were extradited to New York State, which had a death penalty. They stood trial there. Martha and Raymond were tried together in July 1949. Each attempted to defend the other loyally in a manner rarely seen when serial killer couples go to trial. After forty days of sensational and salacious testimony, the couple was convicted and sentenced to death. Interestingly enough, their bond of loyalty was only broken when they were on death row and Fernandez heard rumors that Martha was having an affair with a jail guard. Each began to give interviews to the press accusing the other of being a cold-blooded killer.
Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951, along with two other convicts. It was tradition in Sing Sing that in cases of multiple executions, the weakest convict goes first. Martha was the last to die. Martha Beck’s last words to the press before she was taken away to the death chamber were, “What does it matter who is to blame? My story is a love story, but only those tortured with love can understand what I mean. I was pictured as a fat, unfeeling woman…I am not unfeeling, stupid or moronic…In the history of the world how many crimes have been attributed to love?”
Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—the Moors Murderers
In England, between 1963 and 1965, the young couple Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered five victims, children and adolescents, and are suspected of killing as many as possibly ten. While Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez could be considered profit-motivated serial killers, Brady and Hindley were ushering in the phenomena of male-female, serial sex killer couples. Their kind of depraved, sexual predatory killing had been largely unheard of before in a male and female serial-killing team.
Ian Brady, born in 1938, was the illegitimate son of a cocktail waitress from Glasgow. She led a promiscuous, disordered, alcoholic’s life and her custody of Ian was sporadic. Childhood acquaintances recall Brady bullying other children in foster homes, burying cats alive, breaking the hind legs of dogs, and once setting his foster parents’ dog on fire. Once he was accused of chopping off the heads of four rabbits at school. Brady was said to have felt superior to his peers and was not known to have friends. Indeed he possessed and possesses today a superior intelligence. (He is a prison author of a recent book, The Gates of Janus, an analysis of serial murder.)
Brady did not get in trouble with the law until the age of 11, when he began to engage in petty crimes. He served a four-year probation for burglary, followed by the commission of another burglary, then a year’s sentence in a reformatory when he was 15. When he got into trouble again at 17, it was decided that his foster parents could not control him, and he was sent by the courts to Manchester to live with his recently married mother. Brady hated his mother and resented this new arrangement.
Although Brady was a disciplinary problem student, he was very bright and could be charming and manipulative. He took to reading on his own. When he was 19, Brady became fascinated with Nazis. He devoured a pulp genre of semipornographic paperback accounts of Nazi atrocities popular in the early 1960s—lurid stories that focused on forced brothels, naked gypsy women herded into gas chambers, and sadistic female camp guards. Feeling out of step with his fellow British victors over Nazism, Brady taught himself German. He discovered the literary pretensions of Marquis de Sade. Brady concluded that society was corrupt and that priests, in order to subjugate the poor, conceived the idea of God.
At 23 years old he found himself going nowhere while working in a position beneath his capacity, as stock clerk at Millwards, an industrial chemical supply house. It is there he would meet a typist—18-year-old Myra Hindley.
Myra As a Child
Myra has been described as a perfectly “normal” girl who loved animals and children and brightly colored lipstick. Born in the industrial district of Manchester in 1942, to a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, according to reports, Myra was sent to live with her grandmother at the age of 4 when her younger sister was born and her mother decided the house was now “too overcrowded.” Rejection by their mothers in childhood would appear to be the common denominator between not only Myra and Ian but with many other serial killers—the storing up of fatal childhood resentment. But the story is not as simple as that. Myra’s grandmother apparently lived down the same street as Myra’s mother, and Myra moved effortlessly between the two homes.
If anything, Myra was spoiled by her grandmother, who essentially let the little girl have the run of the house. Although somewhat self-centered, Myra lived a conventional childhood, playing in the playgrounds and going to school. She was an adequate student. Adequate and average. Her marks only suffered because her grandmother allowed her to stay at home whenever she claimed she was not feeling well. Everything in her life was adequate and average and normal, until Myra turned 15.
Myra became attached to an underdeveloped 13-year-old neighborhood boy in the role of a big sister or mother. She spent all her spare time and energy taking the boy on walks, playing with him, defending him against bullies, buying him candy. One hot afternoon the boy came by and asked Myra to accompany him to an abandoned reservoir where local kids gathered to play and swim. Myra was feeling lazy that day and declined. The boy went off without her and drowned that afternoon.
Myra was devastated. For days she walked about as if in a trance and did not sleep. Her only activity was to go door-to-door collecting money for a wreath for the boy’s coffin. Some of the women who opened the door recall that there was a strange, aggressive edge to the stony-faced girl at the door. One said:
She wasn’t like a little girl needin’ sympathy, she made you feel sort o’ guilty, like as if it was your fault [he’d] gone drowned and you better fork out for them flowers or she’d go an’ tell on you.204
Myra mourned for the boy for months until her mother came by and forcibly took her black clothing away. Her morbid mourning became a self-centered focus of everything in her life. She could not understand how the rest of the world and everybody else in it could go on with their lives while she suffered her loss. How dare they? She behaved like a mother whose child had perished and who will never be able to have another and nobody cared. Somebody had to be blamed.
As one of Hindley’s biographers writes, “Where a girl of normal sensibilities would have thought—and gone on thinking—as much of the dead boy’s tragic cutting-off and of his parents’ loss as of her own grief…this girl’s heart stayed exactly where it was: broken perhaps but immovable, right in the center of Myra Hindley.”205
Again, perhaps it is grasping at straws in a sea of normality, but death of a childhood friend or sibling is sometimes a reoccurring theme in serial killers’ childhood histories: the death of Jerry Brudos’s “girlfriend” when he was five (he would go on to murder four women so he could dismember their feet);206 the death of Genene Jones’s adopted sibling and her subsequent morbidity. Yes, it’s tenuous, but what else do we have here? Myra was just so normal.
Aside from a fervent adoption of the Catholic faith, Myra appeared to overcome her obsession with the boy’s death over the next few years. She left school, hardly saying good-bye to any of her friends, and began working as a secretary, moving from company to company in search of better wages and opportunities. She dated but “kept herself for marriage.” She went to dances and movies, attended church, did not drink, became engaged, but then called it off.
“Out with Ian!”
In January 1961, she went to work as a typist in the secretarial pool at the Millwards industrial chemical supply company. There she would take dictation from stock clerk Ian Brady. Although the two did not date for a year, Hindley’s diary would reveal that she was obsessed with Brady, who appeared to be domineering and arrogant, so unlike all the other boys she had known. He would arrive at work on his motorcycle in a leather jacket, goggles, and helmet and peel off the gear at his desk to reveal his business suit beneath. He was mysterious—nobody knew anything about him. For the first seven months, Myra didn’t even speak with Ian Brady.
In her diary on July 23, Myra wrote: “Wonder if Ian is courting. Still feel the same.” July 25: “Haven’t spoke to him yet.” July 27: “Spoken to him. He smiles as though embarrassed. I’m going to change, you’ll notice that in the way I write.”
August 1: “Ian’s taking sly looks at me at work.” August 2: “Not sure if he likes me. They say he gambles on horses.” August 8: “Gone off Ian a bit.” August 11: “Been to the Friendship Pub but not with Ian.” August 14: “I love Ian all over again. He has a cold and would love to mother him.” August 24: “I am in a bad mood because he hasn’t spoken to me today.” August 29: “I hope he loves me and will marry me some day.”
September 9: “Ian is wearing a black shirt today.” October 18: “Ian still ignores me. Fed up. I still love him.” November 1: “Months now since Ian and I spoke.” November 28: “I’ve given up on Ian. He goes out of his way to annoy me, he insults me and deliberately walks in front of me. I have seen the other side of him and that convinces me he is not good.” December 2: “I hate Ian, he has killed all the love I had for him…” December 15: “I am in love with Ian all over again.”
December 22: “Out with Ian!”
On New Year’s Eve, Ian went over to Myra’s house to celebrate with her parents and younger sister. He brought a bottle of German wine and a bottle of whisky, a luxury in those days. The whisky was Myra’s first taste of alcohol. In her diary, Myra would write, “Dad and Ian spoke as if they’d known each other for years. Ian is so gentle he makes me want to cry.”
January 1, 1962: “I have been at Millwards for twelve months and only just gone with him. I hope Ian and I love each other all our lives and get married and are happy ever after.”
There are a few more innocuous entries, but Myra’s diary stops as abruptly as it begins. She would have little time left from now on to make diary entries or to contemplate her life. Ian would be keeping her busy.
On their first date, they went out to the movies—Judgment at Nuremberg, a Spencer Tracy film about the war crimes trial of former Nazi judges who ordered forced sterilization.
Myra had been obsessed with Ian for nearly a year. In her own mind, she was his long before he even knew it. In real life, Myra lost her virginity to Brady and became his slavish girlfriend. Her recent adoption of Catholicism vaporized as Myra was soon convinced by Brady of the nonexistence of God. She was completely enthralled with the older and “sophisticated” Brady, who read intellectual books, sported black shirts, drank German wine, and was learning the language.
Myra later would say, “Within months he had convinced me there was no God at all: He could have told me that the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese, and the sun rose in the west, I would have believed him, such was his power of persuasion, his softly convincing means of speech which fascinated me, because I could never fully comprehend, only browse at the odd sentence here and there, believing it to be gospel truth.”207
Myra testified that after being seduced by Brady he took little further interest in her sexually. He preferred to have her masturbate him while he inserted a candle in his anus. He also wanted her to have anal intercourse with him, which she complained was painful. She also posed for pornographic pictures that Brady would take, using a timer, of the two of them having sex while wearing hoods. Soon Myra began dressing in neo-Nazi-chic—Ilsa black leather skirts and knee-high boots. She colored her hair platinum blonde.
The Killings
Brady, Myra testified, was fascinated by one particular book—Compulsion by Meyer Levin. The book was a historical account of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two university students from wealthy families who, in 1924, in Chicago, killed a 14-year-old boy. Their motive: To prove themselves superior supermen, they decided to commit the “perfect crime.” The two supermen were quickly arrested after Leopold dropped a unique pair of eyeglasses at the scene of the crime. During the trial it was revealed that the two were homosexual lovers and that Leopold adored Loeb and slavishly did anything the other proposed.
According to Myra Hindley, about a year and a half into their relationship, in July of 1963, Brady began to talk to her of committing a perfect murder as proof of their superiority. On July 12, Myra and Brady set out to commit their perfect murder. Myra drove a van while Brady followed her on his motorcycle. It was Myra’s job to pick up a female hitchhiker. She offered a ride to 16-year-old Pauline Reade, who was on her way to a dance in her bright pink party dress.
Myra told Pauline that she was on her way to the moors—a bleak, windy, grassy expanse of wasteland outside of Manchester. She had lost a glove there, Myra said, and if Pauline would help her find it, she would give her some music records as a reward. Pauline agreed, and the two set out to the deserted moors, followed discreetly by Brady on his motorbike.
At the moors, Brady attacked Pauline, raped her, and cut her throat. Although Myra claims that she was in the van when the rape and murder took place, in an open letter from prison in 1990, Brady stated that Myra also committed sexual acts on Pauline. Afterward, using a spade that they had brought with them in the van for the occasion, Myra and Brady buried Pauline’s body on the moor. It was only in July 1987 that her body was found by police and identified by the pink party dress she was buried in.
On November 23, 1963, using the same ruse, they murdered a 12-year-old boy, John Kilbride. Myra stated that Brady raped the boy and strangled him because the knife was too dull to cut his throat. Police were later able to find Kilbride’s grave by identifying prominent land features in a photograph of Myra posing on the grave with her dog. Later, when Myra was under arrest and was told that her dog had died in police custody, she remarked, “They’re nothing but bloody murderers.”
On June 16, 1964, they murdered another 12-year-old boy, Keith Bennett, using the same methods again. After being raped and strangled, he was buried on the moor. His body, despite numerous efforts, including some with the help of Myra and Brady, has never been found.
It would be a year and a half before the couple would kill again. On December 26, 1965, they kidnapped 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey and took her back to their house. Once there, Brady set up a light and camera and forced the girl to pose for pornographic photographs. Then, turning on a tape recorder to record the child’s screams, Brady raped her. According to Brady’s 1990 letter, Myra “insisted upon killing Lesley Ann Downey with her own hands, using a two-foot length of silk cord, which she later used to enjoy toying with in public, in the secret knowledge of what it had been used for.”
In October 1965, Brady decided he wanted to form a gang, and began to talk with Myra’s unemployed brother-in-law, David Smith, about committing a holdup. On the evening of October 6th, Smith dropped by the house and complained of having no money. Brady suggested: “We’ll have to roll a queer.” He went out and came back later with 17-year-old Edward Evans. Brady struck Evans with an ax and strangled him. He made Smith hold the ax so that his fingerprints would be on the weapon and then the two of them wrapped the corpse in plastic and cleaned up the blood. Myra and Brady then went to bed while Smith wandered off home in a state of shock. At home, he told his wife what had occurred and they immediately called the police.
The next morning the police raided Brady’s house and found the corpse in a spare bedroom still wrapped in plastic. In the spine of a prayer book, the police found a key to a train station locker where they discovered the pictures and tape recording of Leslie Ann Downey screaming for mercy as she was being killed. The tapes were played in court during Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s joint trial.
“Instead of the Requisite Lady Macbeth, I Got Messalina.”
They were both sentenced to life imprisonment in May 1966 on three charges of murder. Ian and Myra would not confess to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett until twenty years later, in 1986. They were brought to the moors to assist police in searching for the bodies, but the body of Keith Bennett was never found.
After their sentencing, Myra and Ian continued to correspond with each other for seven years and even asked permission to be married. In 1972, she seduced a prison guard and attempted to escape. Eventually, Myra began to distance herself from Ian and as she began appealing for probation she began to portray herself as a victim. Ian had beaten and drugged her into submission, she claimed. He threatened to kill her if she did not participate in the murders, she said. Claiming to be reformed, Myra began a vigorous campaign to be released in the 1990s after she had served the minimum time of thirty years before becoming eligible for parole.
The crimes of Brady and Hindley touched so raw a nerve in Britain that even in 1997 their crimes remained a sensitive issue. When in September, British Royal Academy of Arts held an exhibition of young artists’ works that included a thirteen-foot portrait of Myra Hindley by painter Marcus Harvey, objections were raised. The family of one of Hindley’s victims appealed to the Academy to exclude the work. On the opening day of the show, the portrait was splashed with paint, ink, and eggs and had to be withdrawn for a week for restoration.
At the height of her campaign for freedom, when it looked very likely that she would be successful on a technicality, Myra Hindley died on November 15, 2002, of complications related to a heart attack. She was 60 years old.
Ian Brady, from the beginning, confessed to his crimes and insisted that he and Myra should never be released. He recently wrote a study of serial murder without referring to his own crimes, which was released in the United States by the alternative publisher Feral House, much to the indignation of the British.
When Myra was appealing for her release, Brady wrote a letter to the British Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1990, who was responsible for justice policy, arguing that Hindley should not be released. In it he said:
First accept the determinant. Myra Hindley and I once loved each other. We were a unified force, not two conflicting entities. The relationship was not based on the delusional concept of folie à deux, but on a conscious/subconscious emotional and psychological affinity.
Folie à deux is a psychiatric disorder sometimes offered as an explanation for why some women might commit horrific murders in the company of their lover or husband. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) it is called “Shared Psychotic Disorder.” It is induced by a stronger personality upon a weaker one (the folie impossée), but delusions can also occur simultaneously in associated predisposed individuals (folie simultanée.)
Brady concluded:
She regarded periodic homicides as rituals of reciprocal innervation, marriage ceremonies theoretically binding us ever closer. As the records show, before we met my criminal activities had been primarily mercenary. Afterwards, a duality of motivation developed. Existential philosophy melded with the spirituality of death and became predominant. We experimented with the concept of total possibility. Instead of the requisite Lady Macbeth, I got Messalina. Apart our futures would have taken radically divergent courses.
Carol Bundy and Douglas Clark—the Sunset Boulevard Killers
In 1980, in Los Angeles, Douglas Clark murdered at least six young women who were either hitchhiking or working as prostitutes in the Sunset Boulevard area. Clark apparently enjoyed shooting his victims in the head as they performed oral sex on him. He would then have sex with their corpses. His girlfriend, Carol Bundy, accompanied Clark on at least one of the murders, sitting in the backseat of the car and watching as Clark murdered the victim in the front. When she felt that Clark was no longer interested in her, she committed a murder of her own.
Carol’s Childhood
Carol Bundy was born in Louisiana in 1943, the second of three children. When she was a preschooler, her family lived briefly in Los Angeles because her older brother began getting small bit parts in movies as a child actor. He can be seen sitting on Santa Claus’s lap in the classic Miracle on 34th Street.
Accounts of Carol’s childhood are truly perplexing.208 As a small child, Carol appears to have been loved and cared for by her parents. When she began to lose her baby teeth, her father dipped a doll’s feet in mud and left a trail of little fairy footprints from the window to her bed. Carol remembers her mother telling the girls magical fairy tales as they lay in bed every night. Even though the family was short of money, one Christmas her younger sister received a bicycle while Carol got her own television set. All the children were intelligent and vacations were often combined with academic goals. When Carol began studying American history in school, the family went off in a car for a vacation in Washington with visits to the Smithsonian and to the New England states. Both her father and mother affectionately called Carol “Petunia.”
Unlike her mother and younger sister, Carol was not a particularly graceful or beautiful girl. She was a little chubby with a dump-linglike body and thin, mousy-brown hair. At the age of nine, she was fitted with thick-lensed glasses and at school was taunted with, “Miss Encyclopedia” and “Four Eyes” by other kids.
Something then went terribly wrong at home. When Carol was 8, for reasons she cannot explain, she was suddenly cut off by her mother. Her mother locked her outside the house. As the little girl pounded on the door and windows to be let in, she says her mother said, “Go away little girl. You don’t live here. You aren’t my little girl.”
Little Carol walked two miles to her father’s place of work and he brought her home. Her parents fought into the night, and Carol claims that after that it was as if she no longer existed for her mother. Carol’s younger sister, Vicky, recalls that their mother was not well mentally. She recalls that their mother was never allowed to administer physical punishment to the children, because once she began beating them, she would not stop until she was pulled off. Vicky said that Carol had already developed a defensive psychology toward her mother. She remembers watching Carol calmly smiling and reading a comic book while her mother beat her around the face and body with a belt.
Carol grew to be an intelligent but withdrawn child who read the dictionary for pleasure and buried herself in science fiction books. When she turned 14, her family life took another seriously nightmarish turn. Her mother suddenly died from a heart attack. That night, her father raped her and her younger sister. He abused her sister for several months and raped Carol one more time. Eight months later, he remarried, and the sexual assaults were replaced by beatings and verbal abuse. It was not long before her father’s new wife left him. After a period in a foster home, Carol and Vicky were reclaimed by their father and they settled in Los Angeles. There, in her first year of high school, Carol engaged in promiscuous sex with boys. She learned that while she was largely unattractive, her sexual willingness would quickly attract attention—although that attention would quickly fade and turn to scorn as soon as the sexual encounter was over. When a rumor spread through her school that Carol was pregnant in ninth grade, she dropped out.
At the age of 17, Carol married a 56-year-old drunk. She left him, she says, because he wanted her to prostitute herself. She admitted, however, that she took small sums of money in exchange for sex during this period.
That same year, Carol met 32-year-old science fiction and erotica writer Richard Geis. He liked Carol’s intelligence and wit and the two began a casual relationship. Geis edited Carol’s first short story, which was published in a mainstream magazine; it was about a policewoman who rode to work on a bus. Carol also put out one issue of a science fiction magazine and published several cartoons.
When Carol was 19, her father committed suicide. Carol began to engage in lesbian relationships, but found that hurt and rejection came as easily from her female lovers as from her male ones.
One day, Carol asked Geis to pay her way through nursing school. Geis agreed, provided she maintained good grades. In 1968, at the age of 25, after graduating as class valedictorian, Carol was certified as a nurse. In the ensuing years, Carol drifted apart from Geis, but they always remained in touch. (Geis would go on to win the Hugo Award as Best Fan Writer in 1975 and 1976.)
Carol married Grant Bundy, a male nurse at a hospital where she worked. They bought a house in Van Nuys, a working-class district east of Hollywood. During her marriage to Grant, Carol gave birth to two sons, David and Chris. When Carol left Grant in 1979, taking her sons with her, they were 9 and 5 years old.
Carol moved into a squalid apartment complex. The manager of the complex was Jack Murray, a part-time country music singer from Australia. Although Murray lived at the complex with his wife, he quickly began an affair with Carol, who became convinced that Murray was going to leave his wife. As her divorce proceeded, the house that Carol owned jointly with her ex-husband was sold, and Carol came into a large sum of money—about twenty-five thousand dollars. Shortly afterward, Jack told Carol he could not leave his wife to marry her because he had discovered she had cancer. Carol quickly gave Jack ten thousand dollars for his wife’s cancer treatment, hoping that he would move in with her. The remainder of her money, she placed in a joint account with Jack, who then proceeded to empty it of an additional eight thousand dollars.
It was around this time that another scavenger moved in on Carol—Douglas Clark. Carol Bundy, who had a fairly promiscuous background and who often engaged in masochistic sex as a submissive partner, was perfect prey for Clark.
Douglas Clark
Douglas Clark was born in 1948, the third son of five children. His father was a senior naval officer and the Clark family lived in Pennsylvania, Seattle, Berkeley, and Japan. In 1959, the father left the navy and went to work as an executive in the private sector as a supply specialist. The family then lived in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific and in India. Neighbors from that period remember Doug as a handsome and normally mischievous child. At home, the only strange incident the family recalled was Doug being caught by his mother at the age of 9 wearing her and his sister’s underwear.
As an adolescent, Doug was sent to a private school in Switzerland, while his parents moved on to other locations. His fellow students remember him telling exaggerated stories of his family’s wealth. Nonetheless, his classmates were impressed by his ability to seduce older women at the age of 15. This was in 1963 and in Switzerland; the sexual revolution had not yet hit that part of the world, yet Doug was conducting adult sexual relations with local women who lived in Geneva. He was, however, expelled from the school after writing what has been described as a “darkly disturbing” sexual letter to one of the female teachers at the school.
At the age of 16, Doug was returned to the United States and enrolled in a military academy. There he became famous for sneaking women back into the school for sex. He also would tape record and photograph himself having sex with the women and share the photographs with his fellow students. He was 19 when he graduated the academy.
Doug Clark then enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and was trained as an Intercept Analyst Specialist. He was stationed in Alaska, where his job was to decode Russian radio transmissions. It is a mystery why Clark left the air force before his term of enlistment ended. He told various stories: One was that he had reported a senior officer as a security risk; another was that he had uncovered a plot by white officers to kill a black enlisted man. His military records remain sealed and the only information available is that Doug Clark was honorably discharged, was awarded a National Defense Service Medal, and all his post-service benefits were intact. He moved to Los Angeles after his release from the air force.
Nothing in his history so far points to Clark as a potential serial killer. His family background was stable and supportive, he was intelligent, reasonably good-looking, and successful with women, albeit with a few kinks. He was slightly maladjusted with a propensity for bragging, had a tendency to be rebellious, and was very self-centered and irresponsible. However, that hardly made him an incipient serial killer.
When Doug was 24, he married a woman who worked as a bookkeeper. They started an upholstery business together, but it failed. In one of those strange coincidences, Doug Clark used to buy upholstery supplies from serial killer Angelo Buono, one of the Hillside Stranglers, who with his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, raped and killed at least ten women in Los Angeles. After Buono was arrested, Clark would talk often of having been in Buono’s shop where the tortures and murders had taken place. Later, when he began to kill, Clark dumped the body of one of his victims opposite the site where Bouno and Bianchi left one of their victims.
After his business failed, Doug trained as a stationary engineer and went to work for the City of Los Angeles tending big power plant boilers in San Fernando. For some time he had a drinking problem, but he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking for two years.
Nonetheless, after four years the marriage broke up. His ex-wife was not too specific as to why the marriage ended other than commenting that he was “lazy around the house.” She remained friends with Doug after their divorce and when he was arrested she could not believe it. She remembered Doug as a perfectly normal man—aside from them wearing each other’s underwear to work one day and his suggesting several times they try wife-swapping and three-way sex. Considering that they were living in California during the early 1970s, those things could hardly be alarming or even unusual.
By the late 1970s, however, disturbing reports began to filter in about Doug Clark from the San Fernando power station, where he worked. His fellow employees always considered him a braggart, but he was also reported to have threatened his coworkers with violence on at least four separate occasions. His rate of absence was also very high—he failed to go to work 15 percent of his working hours. He always had some extraordinarily elaborate excuse for not going to work. Clark was finally fired in 1979, with the supervisors so nervous about the threats that the police were called to his worksite to ensure he did not come back. Clark applied for work as a stationary engineer at the Jergens Soap factory and was hired.
By this time Doug began to focus on seducing especially fat and unattractive women. He would quickly move in with them and establish highly domineering relationships. He often lived rent-free and had the women buy food and cook for him. When they became too demanding he would move on. There seemed to be nothing intense about these relationships. He would not go as far as emptying their bank accounts and stealing their property—it would be little things like borrowing their car and returning it with an empty tank of gas or not paying for the groceries or the long-distance calls. Clark developed his petty exploitation of overweight, unattractive women into an art. Women with those characteristics probably satisfied some pathological need in him.
One night in 1980, in a North Hollywood country music bar, Clark laid his eyes on an overweight woman with mousy hair and Coke-bottle eyeglasses. He asked her to dance, and that is how Doug Clark met Carol Bundy.
“By the Way, I’m Spending the Night with Your Mom.”
Although Carol Bundy would have had sex with Clark the night they met, Clark took his time romancing and seducing Bundy. He told her he was an engineer and gazed seductively into her eyes. He was educated in a private school in Switzerland, he said, and was a former military cryptologist. Unlike a lot of serial killers who weaved fantastic stories of their pasts, Clark was open with the truth—the lies would come later.
He told her that he had to go to a dinner but asked for her phone number, appearing to be smitten by her. Carol, who was an intelligent woman, was impressed with Clark’s own intelligence. When Clark telephoned the next day, Carol must have felt it was “true love.”
Clark went over, played with her two sons, and helped her put them to bed. He told them, to their delight, “By the way, I’m spending the night with your mom.”
When he made love, Carol testified, he genuinely attempted to please her. Carol commented that most men attempted to please her in bed, but that it was an effort that required that she heap praise on them. Clark, Carol said, seemed to enjoy pleasing her in bed, spending hours performing oral sex on her, telling her how beautiful and intelligent she was. His soft, intelligent voice was hypnotic, she said. When Clark woke up in her bed that morning, looking like a little lost boy, and asked her if she would mind if he moved a few of his things in with her, she readily agreed.
Before long, Carol noticed that Clark was actually very self-centered. Although he called her “Motor Mouth,” he showed no interest in hearing about her life. When she tried to show him a short story she had written, he produced a two-inch-thick manuscript of his own of torture stories in dungeons. Their conversation often focused on serial killers and Clark told her of his encounters with Angelo Buono when he was in the upholstery business.
In the dark, as they lay in bed, Clark began to quietly purr his fantasies into Carol’s ear. He would like to subdue and capture a young girl, take her to a country house with a torture chamber, and keep her there as a sex slave, he told her. On another night, Doug told her that throughout history people had been flagrantly slaughtering each other, which she agreed was true. It was fun to kill, Clark said, and any woman who loved him should be willing to kill for him.
On one occasion, Doug told Carol that he was an assassin for the Mafia and asked her to help him kill somebody in Denver. Carol immediately showed her willingness to help by asking him the flight schedules and what she should wear.
In April of 1980, Doug went into a pawnshop and had Carol buy a pair of small .25-caliber handguns. Clark told her that the guns should be registered in her name because he had been convicted of an armed robbery in Indiana and could not possess firearms. This was not true: Unlike many serial killers, Clark had no previous criminal record.
Their fantasies began to spiral. Clark became mildly abusive and disdainful of Bundy, which only made her more desperate for his attention. Tension also had developed between Clark and one of her sons. Carol sent her sons away to live with their paternal grandparents. She sold the children’s furniture and began to look for an apartment near Doug’s place of work.
“How Am I Going to Turn You into a Murderer If You Are Clumsy and Not Observant.”
Police believe that in the late spring of 1980, Clark began to murder young women with Carol’s pistols. On May 31, he picked up a prostitute in the Sunset Strip area and shot her dead. He dumped her body in the Los Angeles hills. On June 11, he lured two young teenage girls into his car and shot them both dead. He took their bodies back to a garage he had rented, had sex with their corpses, and photographed them before dumping their bodies near a road in the Hollywood Hills. Clark told Carol nothing until she discovered a bag of bloodied clothing in her car, which she would often loan him. Carol carefully laundered the clothing.
After Doug told her he had killed the two girls, Carol immediately called the police—not to turn Clark in, but to confirm that indeed he had committed the homicides. She questioned homicide detectives over the phone, saying that she thought her boyfriend was the killer but did not want to turn him in unless she was sure. Could they give her a few details of the homicides? The conversation ended when the police switchboard inadvertently cut her call off.
Clark meanwhile took Carol on a guided tour to show her where he had dumped the bodies of the two teenagers and the body of the first victim, who still had not been discovered. He told Carol he had slit the corpse’s stomach open to encourage the “wiggly-squirmies” to consume it. He took the prostitute’s clothes, which he gave to an 11-year-old-girl in the apartment complex (with whom Carol and Clark were having sex), but kept her underwear for himself.
Carol, correctly, told Clark that he was a sociopath and he took offense at the idea.
Clark focused his trolling on the part of Sunset Boulevard area that straddled Hollywood and West Hollywood—a “ground zero” of the Los Angeles street-hooking scene in the 1980s. This was and is a drab but busy area choked in car exhaust and lined with small, shabby stores, low-income apartments, dingy motels, fast-food joints, and supermarkets, whose parking lots were favored by prostitutes. It was a barren and sun-baked plateau between the downward slope south toward central L.A. and the upward slope north toward the cool of the Hollywood Hills. The prostitutes counted on the rather heavy east-west traffic slowly passing through the area on its way between the various districts of Los Angeles.
On the night of June 20, Clark took Carol along with him on his next kill. Near a supermarket on Highland Avenue, while Carol sat in the backseat of the car, Clark picked up a prostitute who did not mind servicing him in the car while the fat woman in the back watched. As the girl performed oral sex on Clark, he held up his hand, a signal to Carol to slap one of the small .25-caliber handguns into his open palm. Clark then shot the girl once in the head. She lost consciousness but did not die. Carol jumped over into the front seat as Clark drove away. The girl’s head lay in Carol’s lap, pumping blood, as Carol stripped off her jewelry and clothes. Using a paper towel, Carol wiped away the blood that was bubbling out of the girl’s wound and nose. When they got to the northern fringes of L.A., they rolled her body out into the desert and left her there to die. The identity of the girl, somewhere between the ages of 17 and 20, has never been established to this day.
Carol remembers that she was not turned on nor repulsed by the murder—she said that she was riveted to the scene unfolding before her eyes by an intellectual curiosity. As she stripped off the girl’s clothes, she thought how difficult it was to undress an unwilling subject, and that the girl had a good body with nice blonde pubic hairs. When she took the girl’s boots off and found a knife tucked inside beneath her cigarettes and comb, she said that she thought to herself, “Dumb broad—the knife won’t do you any good tucked away like that.”
After the murder, Carol put her intellect behind Doug’s killing. She suggested that he carry with him a “kill bag”—a paper sack containing a knife, paper towels, rubber kitchen gloves, and liquid cleanser. He should clean up the car immediately after each murder. She also suggested that he make each killing progressively more gruesome, so that it appeared to the police as if a psychopath was committing the crimes as opposed to somebody “sane” like Clark. Riding in the car with Doug as he trolled for victims, she tagged them as either “bitches, botches, or butches.”
To confuse the police, Carol called a rape crisis line and said that her black boyfriend had killed the girls. She also tried to get a black nurse at the hospital where she worked to give her one of her pubic hairs. Doug was going to plant it at the scene of the next murder. The nurse was offended and refused.
Doug Clark was killing at a rapidly accelerating rate. On June 22, he went out again—alone this time. He spotted three prostitutes—two white girls and one black girl in the Sunset area. By then the girls were alert to the killings and only the black girl would agree to enter Clark’s car alone. Clark turned her down. Like the typical serial killer, he was only interested in killing within his own race. Clark drove around some more, but could find no victims. He was on his way home, when he spotted one of the white prostitutes walking alone now, a young woman with frosted blonde hair. This time he convinced her to enter his car. As she performed fellatio on him, he shot her through the back of her head. He drove behind a closed restaurant—it was Sunday night. After dragging her body out of his car, he cut and sawed the girl’s head off in the parking lot. He put the head into a plastic bag that Carol had so thoughtfully outfitted him with and tossed it into the back of the car—a station wagon. He drove off, leaving the headless corpse behind the restaurant.
Doug then began to worry that the other two prostitutes might identify him. He returned to the Sunset area and began to look for them. He found the black girl and lured her into the car. He quickly shot her dead, stripped her of her jewelry and money, and rolled her body out into the street. Her murder is an example up how a serial killer’s every homicide has its own method and madness to it. Clark murdered the black woman only because he felt he needed to eliminate her as a witness. Otherwise, however, she was completely outside his killing profile. Clark then went looking for the third girl, but could not find her.
He went home with the blonde girl’s head in the plastic sack, but despite Carol urging him to show it to her, he refused, saying it was “too gross.” Carol argued that she was a nurse and was used to working with corpses, it would not freak her out, but Doug refused just the same.
The next morning, Carol found the head sitting on the counter by the kitchen sink, its frosted blonde hair all damp and soggy and the mouth gaping open. Doug told her that he had taken the head into the shower with him and had copulated with it. He stuck the head in the freezer.
After two days, Doug decided they needed to get rid of the head. Carol went out and bought an elaborate but common wooden chest made in Mexico. At Doug’s request, she combed and fashioned the hair with a blow dryer and applied makeup. Then Doug decided that Carol might have left her fingerprints on the head, so he ordered her to scrub it clean in the kitchen sink. Placing the head in the chest, they drove around until Carol tossed it out of the car into an alley. It was found later that night by somebody parking their car.
Doug was angry that she had not picked a better place to throw the chest. “How am I going to turn you into a murderer if you are clumsy and not observant,” he snarled at her.
Doug Clark continued to humiliate and deride Carol. She must have believed that her participation in the murders would bring her closer to Doug. As carefully as she packed his lunch for work, she would also pack his “kill bag” when he went out at night to “take care of business.” But her slavish attention to Clark’s crimes only reinforced the sense of control he felt he had over her, and led him to be more distant and abusive.
The police had linked all the crimes by the .25-caliber bullet used to kill the victims. They accumulated lists of people who had recently purchased .25-caliber handguns, and of course, upon coming to Carol’s gun registration, they gave it a low investigative priority—the suspect was not going to be a woman, the police surmised.
Clark was by then talking about killing a hundred women. Police suspect he killed, in addition to the five women described above, anywhere from another two to five more women that summer of 1980. He was eventually charged with six homicides, but several more bodies of young women with .25-caliber head wounds had been found. The bullets, however, had been fragmented and could not be conclusively proven to have come from the weapons he used. Carol, in the meantime, was feeling sexually rejected. She noticed that after every murder, Clark was unapproachable for sex. It was not that he seemed satisfied—he was edgy and in a state of euphoria, but he was withdrawn. He was even more critical and derisive of her. He never beat her, but in Carol’s twisted psychology, a beating would have probably indicated to her he still cared. Carol was getting desperate.
“The Honest Truth Is, It’s Fun to Kill People…”
On August 4, to prove her worth as Doug’s mate, Carol decided to commit a murder all on her own. She looked up Jack Murray, the man who had been her lover before Clark and who had cleared out a major portion of her bank account. She convinced him that she wanted to have sex with him in his van. Once inside the van, she shot him in the head. Like a good nurse, Carol checked his pulse and found it to be still strong. She shot him again in the opposite side of his head. She then stabbed him six times in the back. She says she then slashed his anus and carved a piece of his buttocks away to make it look like a “psycho murder.” As she slashed away at him, she remembers saying, “If you want a piece of ass, here’s a piece of ass.”
After carefully cleaning away her fingerprints, Carol realized that the two bullets in Jack’s head would link his murder to the others—so she cut his head off and took it home in a plastic bag. Doug then took Carol out driving in the car. He asked her what she wanted to do with the head. Carol replied, “It’s got three holes. We could go to a bowling alley and bowl down the lane.”
Doug pulled up in front of an industrial garbage bin and told her to throw Jack’s head in the trash. It was never found. Instead of being proud of her, Doug was—to Carol’s disappointment—even more insulting. He told her she was an idiot for taking the head with the slugs in it but leaving behind the spent .25-caliber casing on the floor of the van.
On Saturday night, after neighbors reported a foul smell coming from a van parked nearby, the police discovered Jack’s body. Since witnesses had seen Jack talking to Carol in the North Hollywood bar he frequented, and everybody there knew Carol was one of his ex-lovers, the police questioned her Sunday afternoon. Carol admitted that she had seen Jack earlier the day he disappeared, but denied knowing anything about his murder. When asked whether she owned a .25-caliber handgun, she said that she had owned two, and had sold both in May. No, she did not remember the name of the man she had sold them to.
Doug Clark distanced himself even further from Carol, saying to her, “Whatever you do, don’t get me hung for Jack. I didn’t do Jack and I don’t want to take the rap.” After the police left, Carol Bundy was almost hysterical. She called her sons at her ex-mother-in-law’s home in the north. She talked with them for about twenty minutes. She also called Dick Geis, and asked if she could go up to Oregon to stay with him. He told her he did not want to see her. Doug, in the meantime, had gone out with another woman without telling Carol where they went. She felt alone and abandoned that Sunday night.
It is often some minor thing that finally makes these cases break open. In the case of Doug Clark and Carol Bundy, it was Carol waking on Monday morning and discovering she had run out of Librium, a tranquillizer she took. After driving Doug to work that morning, with him complaining about her the entire drive and calling her “Motor Mouth” for telling the police too much, Carol arrived at the Valley Center Hospital where she worked as a nurse.
At Valley Center she was already considered by her fellow workers to be weird and annoying, but satisfactorily competent at her job. That day her fellow nurses noticed that Carol Bundy was in a state of agitation. Late in the morning, Carol cornered another nurse and babbled out to her the entire story of the murders in all their gory detail. As Carol recounted the minute nuances of cutting off Jack’s head but forgetting to pick up the shell casings, the stunned nurse noticed that Carol’s hand kept groping around inside the pocket of her uniform. The nurse became frightened and thought that Carol might have a handgun in her pocket. Finally, Carol finished her story and said she was going home to gather up the evidence of the murders and turn herself in to the police.
The nurse ran off to call security, and as police descended on the hospital, Carol Bundy calmly went down to the basement, changed her uniform, and oblivious to the panic upstairs, left the hospital unnoticed. Once home, she gathered together the clothes of the victims, some of the bullets, photographs, and other evidence (the handguns were hidden at Jergens where Doug worked) and tried to call the police.
Remarkably, as Bundy dialed number after number, she either got busy signals or answering machines or was told to call other numbers. She finally located a homicide officer from a district far away from where the crimes occurred, who was only vaguely familiar with the murders. He had not even read about them in the newspaper. Nonetheless, he held her on the line as she related to him everything she knew. When he asked her why she was turning in her lover, she replied, “Oh, for quite a hell of a long time he’s been treating me like shit. It’s been worse and worse and worse. And now I’ve done one on my own. Done one completely on my own and he’s falling apart over it and I’m just plain sick of it.”
The detective asked her if she felt bad about the murder she had committed. Carol asserted, “The honest truth is, it’s fun to kill people and if I was allowed to run loose I’d probably do it again. I have to say—I know it’s going to sound sick, it’s going to sound psycho, and I really don’t think I’m that psycho—but it’s kind of fun. Like riding a roller coaster.”
Later Carol wrote to Richard Geis from prison:
Dick, here is one simple truth. It is very easy to kill. We all have the potential. Only social conditioning from childhood prevents each of us from being murderers…I have been told that murder is the easiest of crimes to get away with. I believe it. If I hadn’t confessed…ah, well. Too late. Too late.
As soon as Carol Bundy finished talking on the phone, the police arrived. They had been alerted by her confession at the hospital. As Bundy was already a suspect in the Jack Murray killing, she was quickly picked up. Later that day, Doug Clark was arrested coming out of the Jergens factory. The two handguns were found hidden in the factory.
Doug Clark, after acting as his own defense counsel à la Ted Bundy, was sentenced to death in 1983. He still sits on death row insisting that Carol and Murray committed all the murders and that he was framed.
Carol pleaded guilty and received two consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life for the murders of the unknown prostitute and Jack Murray. She would have been first eligible for parole in 2012, when she turned 69 years old, but she died in prison at age 61 on December 9, 2003.
Charlene and Gerald Gallego—the Sex Slave Killers
No sooner had the Los Angeles police arrested Doug Clark and Carol Bundy in August 1980, when the police in Sacramento, California, got a strange call early in the morning of November 2, 1980. College students were out at a formal dinner that night, following a Founder’s Day dance. As 22-year-old Craig Miller and his date, 21-year-old Mary Beth Sowers, left the restaurant, they were followed by a friend, Andy Beal, who was intending to play a practical joke on them. In the parking lot, before he could pull the joke, he watched as the couple was approached by a young blonde woman. For some strange reason, they accompanied the woman to her car and got into the backseat. Andy Beal then ran to the car and laughing jumped into the driver’s seat. He was surprised to see that sitting in the dark on the passenger side was a sullen man. Looking back at the faces of his friends, he saw that something was wrong. Suddenly the blonde woman leaned in through the driver’s side, slapped his face, and shrieked at him to get out. Shaken, Andy climbed out of the car and watched the woman get in and screech away with his two friends. He had, however, the presence of mind to note down the license plate number of the car.
When the police ran a check of the license number, they found it registered to Sacramento resident Charlene Gallego, a 24-year-old college graduate, married, from a wealthy and respectable Sacramento family—seven months pregnant. When interviewed, she told the police that she was alone that night and nobody had touched her car—it was parked in the driveway. Not knowing whether any kind of foul play had actually occurred in the parking lot and seeing the pregnant Charlene as not particularly suspicious, the police left. The kid must have been mistaken when he wrote the license plate number, or perhaps he had just had one too many to drink and nothing had happened, the police thought. But within hours, the body of Craig Miller was discovered in a field, shot in the back of the head three times with a .25-caliber pistol.
Police then ran a check on Charlene’s husband, Gerald Gallego, and discovered an individual with a lengthy record of sex offenses beginning at the tender age of 13, when he had raped a 7-year-old girl. Gallego, in fact, was wanted for sodomizing his 14-year-old daughter and raping her friend. Moreover, he had a criminal pedigree going back to his father—a man who had killed two law-enforcement officers and was the first person executed in Mississippi State’s gas chamber when Gerald was 9 years old.
The police rushed back to the home of Gerald and Charlene Gallego, but found both them and the car gone. The two had been kidnapping and killing young women, often two victims at a time, since 1978.
The bisexual Charlene tested in prison at an IQ of 160. She was a talented violin player and college graduate from a wealthy California family. One evening, while buying drugs at a club, she met Gerald Gallego. Charlene was instantly attracted to Gallego’s “outlaw” persona and married him.
Once again, she was probably a high-dominance woman who needed a high-dominance man—Gerald was perfect. He fantasized along with Charlene about keeping virginal young sex slaves at a remote country house. On his daughter’s (from another marriage) fourteenth birthday, he sodomized her and raped her friend as Charlene watched.
Things went wrong when one night the both of them seduced a 16-year-old go-go dancer. The three-way sex was fine, but the next day, after coming back from work, Gallego found Charlene and the dancer having sex together. He became enraged, threw the girl out, and stopped having sex with Charlene. Charlene then suggested that they kidnap, rape, and murder young girls.
Killing between September 1978 and November 1980, they often kidnapped girls from Sacramento shopping malls. They also killed in Nevada and Oregon, often beating in the heads of their victims with a tire iron or shooting them with a .25-caliber pistol. They buried alive one victim, a pregnant woman. In three instances, they kidnapped two women at a time. Gerald shared the victims with Charlene, who liked to bite one girl as another performed oral sex on her. She bit the nipple off one of the victims.
At one point, Charlene got into a gun fight with Gerald when he started raping their two young teenage captives in the back “without waiting for her” while she was driving the van. The couple shot at each other until Charlene grazed Gerald’s arm.
The were eventually apprehended, and Gerald Gallego was sentenced to death, while Charlene Gallego, in a familiar pattern, received a sixteen-year sentence in exchange for testifying against Gerald.
While in prison, she continued her education, studying a range of subjects from psychology to business to Icelandic literature. “She’s a pretty intellectual woman,” said Nevada District Judge Richard Wagner, who was the lead prosecutor in Gallego’s Nevada trial. “She has a phenomenal mind, which made her a tremendous witness…She had almost a photographic memory about the victims, down to their shoes and clothes.”
On July 17, 1997, Charlene was set free and reverted to her family name of Williams. In an interview, she claimed that she was as much a victim of Gallego as the other girls: “There were victims who died and there were victims who lived. It’s taken me a hell of a long time to realize that I’m one of the ones who lived.”
Charlene said of Gerald Gallego, “He portrayed to my parents that he was a super family guy. But soon it was like being in the middle of a mud puddle. You can’t see your way out because he eliminated things in my life piece by piece, person by person, until all I had around me were members of his family, and they’re all like him, every one of them…. Prison was freedom compared to being with him.”
Gallego recently died of cancer in the midst of his attempts to get a new trial. On November 20, 1999, a Nevada farmer uncovered a shallow grave containing the bodies of 14-year-old Brenda Judd and 13-year-old Sandra Colley, missing since 1979, two of the ten suspected victims of Charlene and Gerald.
In the psychopathology of male-female serial killer couples, certain distinct patterns are clear. One is that in most of the cases described here, the male partner has a fantasy of holding virginal sex slaves at a remote location—the “Collector” fantasy. The female partner is harder to typify. There seems to be a distinct hatred or anger toward fellow women, mixed with homosexual or bisexual tendencies. The murders were all sexualized by the women, either through direct sexual contact with their victims or through sex with their killer mates.
In each of the cases, even though there was evidence that the female partner contributed equally to the crimes—or even exceeded her male partner—the female always received a lighter sentence. Society is not ready to recognize that a female can be as potentially sadistic and murderous as a male—especially within a male-female couple context.
Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo—the Ken and Barbie Killers
In Ontario, Canada, the case of Paul Bernardo and his wife, Karla Homolka, was hauntingly similar to the Hindley-Brady, Gallegoses, and Bundy-Clark killings. The difference was that they had more advanced technology with which to document the rapes and tortures of their victims: They filmed everything on videotape, leaving behind a horrific record of exactly what an organized, sadistic serial killer does to his victims. In criminal history, never have homicidal videotapes as detailed and extensive as those recorded by Homolka and Bernardo been entered into evidence—not even the notorious videotapes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka have been called the “Ken and Barbie Killers,” after the perfect little dolls that so many girls play with. When arrested, he was 28 and she was 22 years old. Paul Bernardo was blond, blue-eyed, tall, athletic, intelligent, and handsome with what many described as an angelic face. She, too, had a head full of thick blonde tresses, was blue-eyed, smart, petite with a well-proportioned body, and good looks. He was a university-educated accountant and she was a recent high school graduate who worked as a veterinarian’s assistant. Both were brought up in anonymous, middle-middle-class suburbs, attended typically middle-middle-class suburban schools. They frequented typical high school and college student events and parties. Everything about them was “middle-middle” typical—their tastes and styles were not too high class and not too low class. They were upscale, shopping-mall mediocre.
Paul and Karla were married in a lavish, but again typically mediocre-in-taste ceremony that could have, and probably did, come from the pages of a popular bridal magazine. They left the church in a horse-drawn carriage and honeymooned in Hawaii.
They settled in one of those typical, wealthy, middle-sized towns that dot the fertile belt of southern Ontario known as the “Golden Horseshoe” between Toronto and Niagara Falls near the border with the United States. They rented a perfect little lakeside Cape Cod–style house for twelve hundred dollars a month, about thirty minutes from Niagara Falls, and furnished it with typically Canadian pine furniture.
Atypically, by the time Paul and Karla left for their honeymoon, they had already raped, tortured, and murdered two adolescent girls, including Karla’s younger 15-year-old sister. Both crimes they recorded on videotape. So perfectly respectable, attractive, and inoffensively middle-class was the couple, that nobody suspected them of anything as schoolgirls began disappearing in the region—only to be found dismembered and encased in blocks of cement by a pond or dumped in a ditch naked.
Karla Homolka—the Mean Girl
Karla Homolka was born in 1970 and brought up in St. Catharines, an affluent town of about 130,000 people, nestled between Toronto and Niagara Falls. The town is nicknamed the “Garden City” because of the lucrative local agricultural industries—wine grapes, apples, and vegetables. Karla was the oldest of three sisters. Her mother was Canadian—a hospital administrator. Her father immigrated from Czechoslovakia and was a dealer of lamp fixtures and black velvet paintings—the kind that feature Elvis Presley or the Beatles.
Very little is known about Karla’s home life. Her friends remember her as a bossy little girl who was, with no irony intended, called “The Princess.” She had long golden blonde hair and was a very intelligent child. She had a huge collection of Barbie dolls and read children’s mystery novels like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. She wanted to be a detective when she grew up, she said. Her childhood friends remember her as always being extremely dominant in their friendships.
Many said that in high school Karla was the cleverest, prettiest, and most popular. Her only weakness was her lack of athletic aptitude. Yet Karla often appeared to be unhappy. Her marks slipped and she seemed to be obsessed with boys—nothing else interested her. She seemed to urgently want to get married and leave school, and she went through several boyfriends.
When Karla was 15 and 16, she would dye her hair in garish punk shades of red and black. She was on the Pill and having sex, but so were hundreds of thousands of teenage high school girls. There were arguments at home, but nothing serious. When she was 17 she wanted to visit a boyfriend who had moved to Kansas, but her parents refused permission for her to go. She booked a flight and went anyway, but made sure to phone her parents when she arrived there to tell them she was coming back in two weeks and not to worry.
To one girl, Karla showed tiny little scratches on her wrists and said that she had attempted suicide, but the girl, who herself had seriously slashed her wrists, recalls that she did not think Karla was serious about taking her life—it was attention she wanted.
There were a few dark tones to her adolescence. In one student’s yearbook she wrote, “Remember: suicide kicks and fasting is awesome. Bones rule! Death Rules. Death Kicks. I love death. Kill the fucking world.”
Another girl recalls Karla once whispering in her ear as they sat in the school cafeteria, “I’d like to put dots all over somebody’s body and take a knife and then play connect the dots and then pour vinegar all over them.”
Karla read voraciously and her reading material during her high school years reflected a gothic taste: true-crime, occult, horror, and fantasy books were among her favorites.
Karla and her Mean Girls friends formed a little clique they called EDC—Exclusive Diamond Club. The objective, they said, was for each member to find a rich, slightly older, good-looking man, get a diamond, marry, and live happily ever after.
Other girls remember Karla simply as a bubbly, cheerful girl, who talked about going to university and becoming a veterinarian. She worked part-time in a pet store and liked animals.
Overall, nothing has been uncovered in Karla Homolka’s adolescent history that is particularly different from the lives of millions of typical teenagers. No trace of abuse, family dysfunction, rape, abandonment, or trauma. Everything was middle-middle typical.
In 1987, when Karla was 17, she and several of her friends drove to Toronto to attend a pet-store convention during a weekend. They booked into a hotel in Scarborough. That Friday evening, after going drinking and dancing, Karla and her friend came back to their room after midnight. They were on the make because they brought back two men with them, but it didn’t work out—they sent the men on their way. Karla had changed into her pajamas and was ready for bed when she suddenly had the urge for a sandwich. She called room service but was told they were already closed. However, the restaurant downstairs was still open. Karla, dressed in her pajamas, and her friend went down to the restaurant for a late-night snack. That is where she met Paul Bernardo.
“Bastard Child from Hell.”
Hindsight can be cruel, but if there was nothing in Karla’s past that signaled a potential for becoming a serial killer, everything about Paul Bernardo did. On the surface, Paul Bernardo seemed as middle-middle typical as Karla. Paul was born in 1964, the youngest of three children. His father, Kenneth Bernardo, was a successful accountant, while his mother, Marilyn, was a housewife, who in her spare time was an active Girl Guide leader.
Both came from middle-class backgrounds from the prosperous rural town of Kitchener-Waterloo, home of one of the world’s leading computer science universities, located in the heart of Ontario’s Mennonite farming country. Marilyn’s family traced their origins to the United Empire Loyalists—British citizens who rejected the revolution in 1776 in the Thirteen Colonies and moved to Canada to become a ruling elite there. Her father was a lawyer and a colonel in the Canadian Army, who had distinguished himself during the war in Italy. Kenneth Bernardo’s father came from more humble roots: He emigrated from Portugal, but once in Canada, he had built a highly successful tiling company that specialized in fine marble.
After they got married, Kenneth and Marilyn Bernardo settled in a wealthier part of Scarborough, a suburb east of Toronto built during the 1950’s boom in Canada. Their house had a swimming pool out back—a luxury, considering that Canada’s summers barely lasted two months.
Beneath this optimistic family portrait lurked dark shadows. When Paul was a child, his father had repeatedly sexually abused Paul’s 9-year-old sister. On one occasion, neighbors called police after catching him peeping into their windows dressed in his pajamas. This places Paul into a category that 50 to 53 percent of serial killers in the FBI study can be found in: parents with criminal and psychiatric records. (In a bizarre twist, on the same day that Paul was arraigned in court after his arrest, his father, Kenneth, by then aged 58, was appearing in an adjoining courtroom for his sentencing hearing after pleading guilty to repeatedly and indecently assaulting his daughter 20 years earlier, between January 1969 and June 1974. She pressed charges as an adult after she became convinced that he was molesting her own daughter.)209 Witnesses recalled that the Bernardos’ home life was “stormy” and that husband and wife had separate bedrooms. Paul’s mother grew obese, passive, and depressed.
When Paul was about 5 or 6 years old, he apparently ran away from home and remained absent for several days. Paul’s older brother, David, said that nobody in the family even asked him where he had been.
Like many serial killers, Paul Bernardo had an early illness—a form of aphasia as a result of a lack of oxygen to the brain during birth. As a result, he did not speak until the age of 5 and for several years following he stuttered and had speech impediments.
Like Ted Bundy, Bernardo learned in late adolescence that his origins were not those he had thought they were. He was 16 when apparently his mother, after another in a series of bitter arguments with his father, burst into Paul’s room with a picture of a man and declared that he was Paul’s real father. She would refer to her son as the “bastard child from hell.” In a recent interview, his father confirmed that Paul was not his biological son, but said, “That’s his hang-up. That’s never been a hang-up with me.”
As a child in school, Bernardo was isolated and tormented by other children, who chanted “smelly Barnyard, dirty Barnyard.” Nonetheless, Paul grew up to be a popular and athletic youth in his teens. He was remembered as a popular summer camp counselor, who was very kind, gentle, and helpful to children. Again, everybody remembered his angelic face.
Bernardo was, however, developing a secret life. Since about the age of 10, he was collecting women’s lingerie advertisements, although so were probably millions of other 10-year-old boys. But there were other things—the neighbors caught him window-peeping several times, and on one occasion the police were called. Friends recall that by the time Bernardo was in his late teens, he was an avid aficionado of pornographic videos and slasher horror movies.
When he was 19, he entered the University of Toronto to study accounting like his father. His girlfriend from that period testified that he would enjoy having rough sex with her. He would take her in his car to deserted factory parking lots, choke her with a cord, force anal sex on her, and order her to masturbate with a wine bottle. By the age of 19, he was, as the popular saying goes, “one sick little puppy.”
During his college years, Bernardo began supplementing his income by smuggling tax-free cigarettes from Niagara Falls, New York, into Canada. He became intimately familiar with the area that lies between Toronto and the Falls. He also began to develop a sense of himself as an “outlaw.”
“You Have Opened My Eyes to a New Way of Thinking and Being.”
On night, Bernardo and a friend walked into a hotel restaurant for a late-night coffee. The instant he laid his eyes on the blonde in the pajamas he immediately went over to her. They chatted for about an hour, Bernardo spinning stories of his business ambitions. Homolka was enthralled by the handsome, aggressive, confident, blond, 23-year-old Paul; she called him the “big, bad businessman”—like in “the big, bad wolf.” Homolka and her friend invited the two men upstairs to their room. An hour later, Bernardo and Homolka were in bed together. They had mated immediately in an animal lust for each other.
Psychiatrists are still trying to fathom the relationship of Bernardo and Homolka. Karla was a dominant, aggressive young woman, yet she became totally submissive to Paul. Karla was no doubt a high-dominance personality, and believed that she needed a strong and willful man in her life. The psychopath Bernardo matched the bill. The final link in the formula was Homolka’s total lack of any sense of morality. Despite her intelligence, for whatever reasons, she lacked a moral compass. When she came together with the psychopathic, amoral Bernardo, and went along with him into his fantasies, the path to murder was laid.
By the time Paul Bernardo arrived in St. Catharines the next weekend to see Karla, she had told all her Exclusive Diamond Club friends that she had met her Prince Charming. He called at her home and met her parents and then the two went out to see a movie: The Prince of Darkness, a horror film about the unleashing of an evil spirit into the world. Afterward, Karla had invited some of her friends home for a small party. All who met Bernardo agreed with Karla—he was a dream boy.
During the party, Karla and Paul slipped away into her bedroom upstairs. When they closed the door, Bernardo noticed Karla’s jean jacket hanging on the handle: It had a pair of handcuffs sewn to it as decoration. Karla told Paul that he could use those on her. He handcuffed her to the bed and they had sex.
Paul was bright and charming with her parents and appeared to be an attentive boyfriend. He called Karla his “Little Princess.” He would visit every weekend and Wednesday, bringing flowers and gifts. Homolka would always be ready for him with a syrupy-sweet little note. Hundreds of these notes would be entered into evidence later at his murder trial. After some time, Homolka convinced her parents to allow Paul to spend the night at their house on the couch, so that they could spend more time together during his visits from Scarborough. During the night, Paul would sneak up to Karla’s bedroom and make his way back down to the couch before her parents got up.
Karla noticed that Bernardo seemed to want to have less vaginal sex with her and preferred that she fellate him instead. Whenever they had vaginal sex, Bernardo seemed to be unable to climax. They would drive to a popular fishing location, Lake Gibson, and there Bernardo would have Karla perform fellatio on him in the car.
One night at her house, Bernardo rose at night and went around the back to watch Karla’s 12-year-old sister Tammy undressing to go to bed.
In December 1987, two months after he met Karla, Bernardo committed what is believed to be the first of a series of rapes in Scarborough. It was every woman’s nightmare: The victim got off the bus near her home late at night. She was jumped by a stranger from the dark, dragged out of view, raped, and sodomized. This means that by the time Karla had met Paul, or shortly afterward, he was already committing brutal rapes. When arrested for murder, Paul was also charged with twenty-three rape-related counts that occurred in Scarborough.
In the meantime, Bernardo was letting his true colors show to his 17-year-old girlfriend, Karla. He now ordered her to call herself names when she gave him fellatio: “cocksucker, cunt, and slut.” They had to be in that precise order. In the car at Lake Gibson, Karla would have to say as she began fellating him, “My name is Karla. I am 17. I’m your little cocksucker. I’m your little cunt. I’m your little slut.”
Then in December, Bernardo announced that since Karla was not a virgin when they met, they should have anal sex. Karla refused and this became a source of stress in their relationship for two months. Bernardo demanded that Karla invent a name for his penis. She came up with “Snuffles.”
A letter sent by Karla to Paul included a love coupon, which stated: “The bearer will receive one cute little blonde 17-year-old to put on her knees between his legs and satisfy his wishes.” In an accompanying note, Karla wrote:
Dear Paul,
You’re a dream come true. You are the best, my Big, Bad, Businessman. I’ve been fantasizing what playful things to do with your body all day. Your strong chest. Your muscular arms. Your beautifully shaped legs. Your hard, flat stomach. And Snuffles, oh wonderful Snuffles. The pleasure I get from touching, from licking, from sucking Snuffles, is indescribable.
You know what I love? Having you stick it inside me and making me gasp for air while my parents are in the next room. I love it when you shoot it into my mouth. I want to swallow every drop, and then some. The power you wield over me is indescribable. When we sit together on the couch I have to use all my strength to keep from ripping off your clothes. You make me so horny…
I love you an amount I never thought possible. Words can’t even come close to expressing my feelings. With you in my life, I feel complete. Whole. With you by my side nothing can go wrong. You have opened my eyes to a new way of thinking and being. I will love you forever, no matter what.
Karla XOXOXO
In the car at Lake Gibson, Karla was then expected to follow this script: “I love having Snuffles in my mouth.”
“And what are you?”
“Your little cocksucker.”
“What else?”
“Your little cunt. Your slut. I want to suck on Snuffles all the time.”
In February 1988, after Paul Bernardo threatened to drop her, Karla finally agreed to anal sex. He brought Karla back to his parents’ house while they were away on vacation. As usual, by the time Karla had agreed to anal intercourse, Bernardo was ahead of her. Now he wanted to take pictures as well. Setting up his Polaroid camera, he had Karla masturbate with a wine bottle. He then had her get on the bed and he penetrated her anally. At one point, he tied a black electrical cord around her neck and yanked on it. In his hand, he held an eight-inch-long hunting knife. He told Karla not to worry, that the two props excited him more. The dated photographs were later entered into evidence.
Instead of running as far away from Bernardo as she could, Karla actually became excited by these games and told Paul she hoped that he would marry her.
In the autumn of 1988, about a year after they had met, Homolka said that Bernardo struck her for the first time. He told her he wanted her to wear a dog collar, and when she laughed, he slapped her. The next time they had anal sex, Karla was tugging on a dog leash while Bernardo tenderly whispered, “You’re my little mutt.” That was shortly followed by Bernardo’s demand for “analingus” and that Karla now also add “ass-licker” to her vocabulary of scripted words.
In one of Homolka’s cards to Bernardo (which she wrote and mailed almost every day), she wrote—around her first anniversary:
Thanks for the best year of my life. You enriched my life beyond belief…I want to suck Snuffles and get him so hard that he can’t take it anymore. And then I want to ease your pulsating penis into my tight little cunt. Your little girl wants to be abused. She needs her Big Bad Businessman to dominate her the best he can.
Love, Kar
In 1989, Karla Homolka graduated from high school. She wanted to become a policewoman and was planning to enter the Faculty of Criminology at the University of Toronto. Bernardo told her that he did not want “his wife” working in a job as dangerous as a policewoman’s. Thus instead of school, Homolka went to work as an assistant in a veterinarian’s office in St. Catharines. She had thought first of going to Toronto, but by then, Bernardo was smuggling cigarettes almost full-time, and told her that he wanted to live in the St. Catharines area, conveniently in the middle between the U.S. border and Toronto.
During Karla’s graduation party, Bernardo displayed another side of himself. He drunkenly accused some of her fellow male students of flirting with Karla and got into a fight with several of them. Although they were members of the school football team and were quite athletic, Bernardo showed no fear in fighting them. Despite being outnumbered by big football players and receiving a few blows that bloodied his nose, Bernardo continued to throw punches and seemed to enjoy the confrontation. Unlike many serial killers, Bernardo was not afraid or physically meek in the presence of other males.
Bernardo wanted to produce a rap record and recorded an album he titled Deadly Innocence in his home studio. During his trial, the judge refused to allow the lyrics of the songs to be entered into evidence. In the eyes of the law, the poetry or lyrics that one writes do not necessarily reflect the actual state of mind of the artist. Perhaps…but here is what Bernardo wrote anyway:
You think I’m innocent?
But behind this I’m packing a lot of deadliness
So come at, come at me
I got a fucking nice face
I look like a pretty boy
Why don’t you come at me, man?
Take your best shot
See what happens to you, pal
You’re outta here, man
You come at me with your beer belly
And you think you’re really tough
I come back, looking like I’m 13 years old
I’ll kick your ass
I’ll kill your parents
I’ll shoot your girlfriend
And fuck your wife
That’s me, Deadly Innocence.
Bernardo was as completely aware of the angelic image he projected as he was of the violent rage that seethed inside.
Karla’s parents and her younger sister, Tammy, were enthralled with the baby-faced Paul Bernardo. Her mother referred to him as her “weekend son,” while 15-year-old Tammy was in love with her sister’s boyfriend. In the winter of 1990, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka became engaged to be married. They began to slowly plan a wedding for June of 1991.
The Christmas Present
Bernardo, in the meantime, became obsessed with Tammy. He would enter her room at night while she was sleeping and masturbate on her pillow. He began to demand that Karla dress in Tammy’s clothes and developed a new script for her. (“Scripting” is a typical trait of a sexually sadistic offender.) Now Karla had to say, “I’m your 15-year-old virgin. I love you. You’re the king.” While Karla would perform oral sex on Bernardo, he’d stare at a photograph of Tammy. He would insist that he and Karla have sex in Tammy’s bedroom while she was out. None of this seemed to offend Karla and she went along with the game.
Sometime in 1990, Bernardo bought a video camcorder. He said they would need it for the wedding. Bernardo began to obsessively record everything on videotape.
One day, Bernardo and Tammy drove over to the U.S. to buy some liquor without Karla. On the way back, they stopped and necked. Karla somehow became aware of this and lashed out angrily at Bernardo: “She’s a virgin. She wouldn’t know what to do with Snuffles.”
Bernardo charged into the opening that Karla had inadvertently made: “Maybe I should have sex with Tam and teach her the proper way. Wouldn’t it be great if Tam got to feel Snuffles inside of her? Wouldn’t it be great if I took her virginity?”
Homolka refused to entertain the idea, and as with Bernardo’s demands for anal sex, her refusal strained their relationship. Homolka became afraid that the June wedding might not take place despite the $4,500 engagement ring Bernardo had given her.
Finally, Homolka gave up in December of 1990—she agreed to give Tammy’s virginity to Bernardo as a “Christmas present” as compensation for not being a virgin herself. From the veterinarian clinic where she worked, Karla stole some halothane, an etherlike substance used to sedate animals. Telling a pharmacist she was ordering sedatives for the animal clinic, she also ordered some Halcion, a powerful triazolam sedative.
On Christmas Eve of 1990, Bernardo and his video camera showed up at the Homolka’s house to spend the holidays. Years later, television audiences would be horrified by the home videos of 15-year-old Tammy drinking down eggnog spiked with Halcion while Bernardo and Karla hovered over her. She had less than a few hours left to live.
At the end of the evening, the parents retired to bed and told Tammy she should turn in as well. Little Tammy protested: Karla and Paul had invited her to stay up with them and watch a movie on the VCR and spend some time together. The Homolkas went to bed while Bernardo slid a cassette into the VCR. The movie was Lisa, about a young woman who falls in love with a man she does not know is a serial killer. By the time the movie finished, Tammy had passed out from all the Halcion she had consumed.
Karla quickly ran to her room and got the halothane. She poured it onto a cloth and held it around Tammy’s face to make sure she was more deeply sedated. Bernardo meanwhile unbuttoned Tammy’s blouse and fondled her breasts. Karla stripped naked while Bernardo pulled off Tammy’s track pants and underwear. He then switched on the video camera. This part of the videotape was never broadcast on television, but it was shown to the jury in the courtroom five years later at Bernardo’s trial for murder. The tapes presented in court reveal what took place as recorded by Bernardo’s video camera:
(Video recording starts.)
HOMOLKA: Put on a condom.
(Bernardo vaginally penetrates Tammy Homolka.)
HOMOLKA: Paul, hurry up.
BERNARDO: Shut up!
HOMOLKA: Please, hurry up, before someone comes down.
BERNARDO: Shut up. Keep her down.
(Homolka pours more halothane onto the cloth pressed against Tammy’s face. Bernardo again enters Tammy. Homolka urges Bernardo to put on a condom.)
HOMOLKA: Put something on.
BERNARDO: Shut up, Karla.
HOMOLKA: Put something on. Do it.
BERNARDO: You’re getting all worked up.
HOMOLKA: Fucking do it. Just do it.
(Bernardo penetrates Tammy anally. He continues for about a minute.)
BERNARDO: Do you love me?
HOMOLKA: Yes.
BERNARDO: Will you blow me?
HOMOLKA: Yes.
BERNARDO: Suck on her breasts.
HOMOLKA: I can’t.
BERNARDO: Suck on her breasts. Suck. Suck. Suck.
(Homolka sucks Tammy’s breasts.)
HOMOLKA: Hurry up, please.
BERNARDO: Lick her cunt.
(Bernardo pushes Homolka’s head between Tammy’s legs.)
BERNARDO: Lick. You’re not doing it.
HOMOLKA: I am so.
BERNARDO: Do it. Lick her cunt. Lick it. Lick it up clean. Now put your finger inside.
HOMOLKA: I don’t want to.
BERNARDO: Do it now. Quick, right now. Put three fingers right inside.
HOMOLKA: No.
BERNARDO: Put it inside. Inside! Inside!
(Homolka inserts her finger into Tammy’s vagina. When she withdraws her finger it is smeared with menstrual blood.)
BERNARDO: Okay, taste it. Taste it. Inside…inside.
HOMOLKA: I did, I…did!
BERNARDO: Now do it again, deeper. Inside. Deeper. Right inside. Okay, taste good? Taste good?
HOMOLKA: Fucking disgusting!
(The video recording stops.)
Homolka later testified that at this point Bernardo struck her and told her to be more cooperative before the camera. Bernardo then switched the camera back on and had Karla hold it while he again had vaginal and anal sex with Tammy. He had not climaxed when the video recorded him suddenly stopping and withdrawing. Homolka put the camera down and switched it off.
She testified that Bernardo said that something seemed wrong—it appeared like Tammy wasn’t breathing.
Tammy was dead. She had vomited and choked to death during the rape. The emergency crews had arrived at the house at about 2:00 a.m. that night, but there was nothing they could do. A police officer, who responded to the call, remembers seeing a strange, huge, burnlike red mark around Tammy’s mouth and nose. In the autopsy photograph it is cherry-red bright. He noted that Tammy had been moved from the living room to a bedroom. Bernardo said they had moved Tammy because the light was better in the bedroom—they could see better there. The police officer checked the lights in both rooms and saw that they were equally bright, but then thought that people under stress can react in all manner of inexplicable ways. He asked about the red marks on Tammy’s face, and Bernardo replied that they probably were caused by the rug when they dragged Tammy to the other room. They would have had to drag her facedown, the police officer thought—which was odd. But the officer’s duties were to merely file the response report and not to investigate the accident. Moreover, he was a rookie who had just come on the job. He kept his suspicions to himself and left it to the senior detectives and coroner to investigate.
After interviewing the Homolkas and being told that Bernardo was a fine, upstanding young accountant, who was scheduled to marry Karla in June and who was loved by the family like a son, the police developed no strong suspicion of him.
Forensic pathology is as much an interpretive art as it is a science. The extent to which a pathologist will explore a death in an autopsy depends upon the external circumstances presented to him by the police. Had Tammy’s body been found abandoned by a roadside, perhaps the autopsy would have been more extensive, but Tammy’s body was found by her concerned, loving sister and future brother-in-law. Tests were made for illicit drugs, but the recreational kind—not for animal sedatives. The burns around her mouth, the pathologist concluded, were the result of acidity in her vomit. Her rectum and vagina were inspected, but showed no indications of rape. Bernardo had not had time to ejaculate. Again, even if no seminal fluids were found, Tammy’s vagina and anus should have been dilated enough to signal the pathologists that something was wrong, had they been looking for such signals. But they were not. The official autopsy result was death by aspiration of vomit.
During Bernardo’s trial five years later, Homolka was cross-examined about her role in the death of her little sister:
“The first time he mentioned having sex with your sister I would have thought you’d spring out of bed and say, ‘There’s no way I’m going to let you touch my baby sister.’ Wouldn’t that be the right reaction?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t do that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You thought, ‘Knock her out and have some sex with her. What’s the harm’?”
“I didn’t know her safety would be in danger. I was afraid he would do it regardless. I was afraid he would just grab her off the street and rape her. This was the best way. I had no choice…I thought it would happen once and it would be over.”
Homolka claimed that because of Tammy, Bernardo had something to hold over her head. She claimed that because she feared Bernardo would expose her role in Tammy’s death to her parents, she became his unwilling slave.
Homolka said that after the death of her sister, she was numb. Obviously not numb enough to complain that her parents spent too much money on Tammy’s funeral. Homolka wrote to a friend a few months after Tammy’s death:
My wedding plans are great, except for my parents being such assholes. They pulled out half of the money from the wedding saying they couldn’t afford it. Bullshit!!! Now Paul and I have to pay for seven or eight thousand dollars of the wedding. We’ve been compromising like crazy; a cash bar, no flowers on the table, etc. Finally Paul and I said fuck it! No paying for the bar. Cocktails. Everything!!!
Fucking parents. They are being so stupid. Only thinking of themselves. My father doesn’t even want us to have a wedding. He thinks we should just go to the hall. Screw that! If he wants to sit at home and be miserable, he’s welcome to it. He hasn’t worked, except for one day, since Tammy died. He’s wallowing in his own misery, and fucking me.
It sounds awful on paper, but I know you really see what I’m saying. Tammy always said she wanted a Porsche on her sixteenth birthday. Now my dad keeps saying, “I should have bought it” Bull! If he really felt like that he’d be paying for my wedding because I could die tomorrow, or next year. He’s such a liar.
And for the real reason we moved out. My parents told Paul and I that they wanted him to stay at the house until the wedding. Then they said they wanted him to go after Tammy died because they needed their privacy. First they took away half the wedding money, and then they kicked us out. They knew how much we needed to be together, but they didn’t care. What assholes!!!
About three weeks after the funeral, Karla’s parents went away for a week to recuperate after Tammy’s death while Karla’s other sister went to stay with friends. Karla and Paul were alone in the house. Bernardo spent a lot of time masturbating to the videotape they had made of Tammy’s rape. He and Karla went into Tammy’s room, which had remained untouched since her death. Bernardo set the video camera up on a tripod facing Tammy’s bed. While Homolka put on Tammy’s clothes, Bernardo warned her, “Remember, don’t say anything stupid that will ruin the tape.” He was still mad at Karla for saying she was not enjoying performing oral sex on her sister the night she died. Paul told her, “It’s my only tape of Tammy and you fucked it up.”
(Video recording starts.)
(Bernardo is lying naked on Tammy’s bed. Homolka is with him, with her hair brushed forward over her face. Bernardo is holding a picture of Tammy. Homolka is performing fellatio on him.)
BERNARDO: Here’s my little virgin Tammy. Fucked by me. I broke the hymen.
HOMOLKA: Tammy was a virgin.
(Bernardo turns over onto his hands and knees while Homolka performs analingus while rubbing his penis at the same time.)
HOMOLKA: I love licking your ass. I love sucking your cock. I love you. I love to be fucking you so much.
(Bernardo rolls over on his back and adjusts Homolka’s hair so it covers her face. She is fellating him.)
HOMOLKA: I love you so much.
BERNARDO: I love you too, Tammy.
HOMOLKA: I want your cock in me. I’ll give you the best orgasm of all. Together we’re perfect. I want to lose my virginity to you.
BERNARDO: You didn’t know I was filming you, Tammy, when you were in your room, undressing. But I was watching you through the window.
HOMOLKA: Can you ever stop thinking of me? Can you ever stop coming in my face? Take my virginity, Paul. Take it.
BERNARDOO: I will, Tammy. I love you, Tammy.
(Bernardo positions Homolka on her hands and knees and enters her anally. He is still holding Tammy’s photograph in his hand.)
HOMOLKA: Oh, I’m losing my virginity. I love you, Paul. I love you so much.
(Bernardo repositions the video camera at the side of the bed. He motions to Homolka to enter the frame while he looks directly into the camera.)
BERNARDO: Hi, Tam.
HOMOLKA: Hi, Paul.
BERNARDO: Gonna make me happy?
HOMOLKA: I love sucking you.
BERNARDO: You’re better than Karla, that’s for sure.
HOMOLKA: I love you. Will you fuck me, Paul?
(While Homolka performs oral sex, Bernardo holds the picture of Tammy.)
HOMOLKA: I’m a virgin.
BERNARDO: Oh, Tammy. Oh, I love you. Yes. Yes. Yes, my little virgin. Yes.
HOMOLKA: I love you, Paul. I’m your virgin.
(Homolka performs fellatio on Bernardo for twenty minutes until he climaxes.)
(Video recording stops.)
The next night Bernardo went out driving. Before leaving, he told Homolka that if he came back with a girl, she was to hide or pretend to be his sister. He returned with a young woman about 16 years old and the two had sex while Homolka hid behind the drapes.
The next night, Bernardo made another tape. This one was made by a roaring fireplace in the same room where Tammy had died. Bernardo was stretched out on his back with a glass of wine in his hand as Homolka performed fellatio. In between, she would stop and talk:
(Video recording starts.)
HOMOLKA: I loved it when you fucked my little sister. I loved it when you fucked Tammy. I loved it when you took her virginity. You’re the king. I love licking your ass, Paul. I’ll bet Tammy would have loved to lick your ass. I loved it when you put Snuffles up her ass.
BERNARDO: How did you feel?
HOMOLKA: I felt proud. I felt happy.
BERNARDO: What else?
HOMOLKA: I felt horny. It’s my mission in life to make you feel good.
BERNARDO: (Into the camera) That is why I’m going to marry her.
Skoal to the king.
HOMOLKA: I’m glad you made me lick her cunt.
BERNARDO: Are you a fully fledged dyke?
HOMOLKA: No, I’m not.
BERNARDO: You were having sex with your little sister.
HOMOLKA: That was different. It was my little sister.
(Homolka strokes Bernardo’s penis.)
BERNARDO: Love in the family. Do you believe in that concept?
HOMOLKA: You know I had fun doing it. You know I liked it.
BERNARDO: What did it teach you?
HOMOLKA: Well…we like little girls. I like you to fuck them. If you’re going to fuck them, then I’m going to lick them. All the little girls.
BERNARDO: What age should they be?
HOMOLKA: Thirteen.
BERNARDO: Why?
HOMOLKA: Because it will make you happy.
BERNARDO: But why thirteen?
HOMOLKA: That’s a good age.
BERNARDO: Because why?
HOMOLKA: Because they’ll still be virgins.
BERNARDO: What are you saying?
(Homolka and Bernardo look at each other.)
HOMOLKA: I’m saying I think you should fuck them and take their virginity. Break their hymens with Snuffles. They’re all our children, and I think you should make them ours even more.
BERNARDO: You’re absolutely right. That’s a good idea. When did you come up with it?
HOMOLKA: Just now.
(Homolka performs more oral sex on Bernardo and then gets up and walks out of camera range.)
HOMOLKA: I have a surprise for you.
(Homolka re-enters camera range, and holding a paper bag in her hand, sits down beside Bernardo. From the bag she takes out a bra and panties and hands them to Bernardo.)
HOMOLKA: It’s Tammy’s.
(Bernardo smells Tammy’s bra while Homolka rubs his penis with the panties.)
HOMOLKA: I want to rub Tammy’s underwear all over your body. It will make you feel so good. I’m so glad you took her virginity, Paul. I wish we had four kids, Paul.
BERNARDO: Yes?
HOMOLKA: So you could fuck each one of them. (Rapidly rubbing the underwear on Bernardo’s penis.) How does the king like that?
BERNARDO: Yeah.
HOMOLKA: I think the king should turn over.
BERNARDO: Okay.
HOMOLKA: Because his little slave has some more things to say and do.
(Bernardo gets on his hands and knees while Homolka positions herself behind him. She probes his anus with one hand, licks it, while with the other hand she strokes his penis.)
BERNARDO: Oh, my little ass-licker.
(After several minutes, they change positions. Bernardo lies on his back while Homolka strokes his penis with a long-stemmed rose.)
HOMOLKA: You know what we’re going to do with this? (Holding up the rose to the camera.) We’re going to take this to Tammy’s tomorrow, and put it on her grave.
BERNARDO: Why?
HOMOLKA: Because it will give you pleasure. You loved her. She loved you. You were her favorite, you know. The things that you did, you know I loved it. The way you fucked her in what, sixty seconds? She loved it. She loved it.
BERNARDO: Your titties are bigger than hers.
HOMOLKA: I know.
BERNARDO: They taste better. When Tammy was alive, what did you used to do?
HOMOLKA: You made me lick it and suck it. And now I’m doing it on my own because I loved it, Paul. I loved everything you did with her. She was our little play toy.
(Homolka resumes fellating Bernardo.)
BERNARDO: And we both loved her so much.
HOMOLKA: Yes, our little virgin. She loved us.
BERNARDO: What else?
HOMOLKA: I didn’t give you my virginity, so I gave you Tammy’s instead. I loved you enough to do that.
Homolka then began to talk about the girl Bernardo brought back to the house the night before.
HOMOLKA: (Clutching at Bernardo’s penis.) You fucked her with this. You fucked her cunt. She sucked you. She sucked Snuffles. She put it in her mouth, like this…You put her on her knees. You fucked her. And I let you do that because I love you, because you’re the king…I want to do it again.
BERNARDO: When?
HOMOLKA: This summer, because the weather is too bad in the winter. If we can do that then it’s good.
BERNARDO: Good.
HOMOLKA: If you want to do it fifty more times, we can do it fifty more times. If you want to do it every weekend, we can do it every weekend. Whenever we can. Because I love you. Because you’re the king. Because you deserve it.
BERNARDO: Virgin cunts for me.
HOMOLKA: Yeah.
BERNARDO: Virgins just for me. It’ll make me happy…going from one cunt to another, from one ass to another. Will you help me get the virgins?
HOMOLKA: Yes, I’ll go in the car with you if you want, if you think that’s best. Or I’ll stay here and clean up afterward. I’ll do everything I can because I want you to be happy. Because you’re the king.
(Homolka sucks on Bernado’s toes.)
BERNARDO: Oh, footsies.
HOMOLKA: Got to treat the king like a king.
BERNARDO: Good and what else?
HOMOLKA: I’m your little cocksucker. My nipples are so hard. I’m your cunt. Your little slut. Your little ass-licker. Your little virgin.
BERNARDO: (Raising his glass to the camera.) It’s good to be king.
HOMOLKA: I’m your cunt-licking slut, the keeper of your virgins. Your ass-licking bitch. And I love you. I want to marry you.
(Video recording stops.)
The tape ended without Bernardo climaxing. It was an extraordinary insight into the minds and dynamics of a serial killer couple. Not only did they record their crimes, but also their intimate moments in which the fantasies of these crimes were brought to the surface.
“Why Couldn’t It Have Been the Same with Tammy?”
Karla’s parents were indeed tired of having Bernardo around. They were also upset by how Bernardo constantly hovered over their daughter, never leaving her alone with them. When they would speak with her, Bernardo would speak in her place. They asked Bernardo to move out, explaining that they needed privacy to grieve over Tammy’s death. To their dismay, Karla moved out with Bernardo in a huff.
The couple rented the house in the picturesque little lakeside town of Port Dalhousie, just outside of St. Catharines. Bernardo and Homolka were alone with their fantasies in their own private space.
Life with Bernardo was horrendous. Any time Karla made a mistake, Bernardo would unwind full punches to her upper arms—places where the bruising could be covered with a long-sleeved blouse. Another punishment he inflicted he called the “terrorist attack.” He would wait until Karla had fallen asleep and then he’d suddenly jump on her, entering her anally and pummeling her with his fists. Her nights became long, restless stretches of semisleep, hovering between the nightmares of her dream-state and those of her waking life. One night, Bernardo was tossing and turning. Finding the bed too small, he pushed Homolka out on the floor. From that night on, he insisted that she always sleep on the floor while he occupied the entire bed. Not once did Homolka consider not marrying her Prince Charming. The wedding planning continued in earnest.
In the meantime, Paul prowled at night and in the early mornings, attacking women and brutally raping them. He would tell Karla about the attacks. She scolded him when he raped a young woman jogging one morning in Port Dalhousie. Too close to their home, she complained.
On June 6, 1991, while Bernardo was out, Karla invited a 15-year-old girl known only as “Jane Doe” for a sleepover at their house. Karla had met the girl when the girl was 12—she used to hang around the pet-food store Karla worked in. Jane looked up to Karla and thought of her as a beautiful princess. She was a little surprised at the invitation, but eagerly went over to the house in Port Dalhousie. As they watched the movie Ghost, Karla plied the girl with drinks spiked with sedatives. When the girl lost consciousness, Karla phoned Bernardo on his cell phone, telling him to come home because she had a “surprise” wedding gift for him.
When Paul got home, Karla offered up the unconscious girl to him. Bernardo was unsure at first, expressing concern over what had happened to Tammy. Karla reassured Bernardo that this time she had the drug dosage under control.
They videotaped themselves raping the unconscious girl. In the fifteen-minute videotape, Bernardo is seen forcing his way past the virgin girl’s intact hymen, commenting, “Shit, I’ll have to bust it.” Karla rubbed her genitals against Jane’s face, rotating her hips lasciviously, and then inserted the girl’s limp fingers into her vagina while aping for the camera. Karla pretended to put a big, sloppy, fat kiss on the camera lens and performed cunnilingus on the girl.
The next day, Jane Doe awoke feeling sick but unaware of what had happened to her the night before. After driving the girl home that morning, Paul brutally punched Karla in the arm as he had a tendency to do when she did something he did not like.
“What was that for?” Karla whined.
“Everything went so smoothly with Jane,” Paul complained. “Why couldn’t it have been the same with Tammy?”
But Karla had shown Paul she was ready to play and could even take the lead.
The Murder of Leslie Mahaffy
A week later, on the night of June 14 or June 15, 1991—exactly two weeks before Bernardo and Homolka were to be married—Paul went out prowling as he often did. Bernardo had often told Homolka that if he saw an appropriate “virgin” victim, he would kidnap her and bring her back. It did not seem to particularly concern Karla. That night, however, Bernardo had another mission in mind as he prowled the quiet residential suburbs of Burlington, yet another anonymous and affluent town in the Golden Horseshoe between Toronto and Niagara Falls. He had left his accounting job and was now a full-time liquor and cigarette smuggler. He used stolen license plates on his car during his smuggling runs in the belief that Canadian customs agents were staking out the parking lots of duty-free stores on the U.S. side and radioing back the license numbers of Canadian cars parked there. Wearing a dark-hooded sweatshirt, Bernardo surreptitiously made his way between the dark yards and driveways of the sleeping housing tracts, looking for suitable license plates to steal. His prowling must have stirred all sorts of sexual associations for him of window peeping and pouncing on unsuspecting women to rape them. At about 2:30 a.m., Bernardo slipped into the backyard of Deborah and Dan Mahaffy’s house. There he saw their 14-year-old daughter, Leslie, sitting alone in the dark of their backyard on a picnic bench.
Leslie Mahaffy was a cute girl with long, straight, honey blonde hair and braces gracing a warm smile. She was a highly spirited, independent, and rebellious girl—but reasonably responsible. After one argument too many with her parents, she had recently run away from home. Unlike most teenage runaways, she did not run to the streets, but instead to the home of her best friend. Her friend’s mother allowed her to stay there and Leslie phoned home every day, assuring her parents she was fine. After about ten days, tired of her independence, Leslie returned home; there seemed to be less tension with her parents. The main issue had been that Leslie was expected to come home by 11:00 p.m. sharp.
On Tuesday night, four of Leslie’s fellow high school friends were killed in a horrific car accident. That Friday, she and her friends had gathered together at the funeral home and later at a park to mourn their friends. Leslie’s mother had dropped her off at the funeral home and told her that she could stay out a little later than 11:00 that night, but she was to phone home. Leslie stayed out until 1:30 a.m., and in a world still without pocket cell phones, she never telephoned.
A male friend of Leslie’s walked her home. When they arrived at her house, everybody had gone to sleep. Her friend wanted to wait until she went inside, but Leslie assured him that she would go in through the side door, which was always left open. She told him to go home. Alone, she discovered that both the side and back doors were locked. Leslie used to have a key, but when she ran away her parents had changed the locks on the doors. When Leslie returned home, they had not given her a new key. It was an oversight that cost their daughter her life.
Afraid that her mother would not let her go to the funeral the next day because of how late she was getting home, Leslie decided not to wake her parents up. At 2:00 a.m., using a public phone near their house, Leslie phoned her friend at whose house she had previously stayed. She wanted to go over and stay the night there, but her friend’s mother would have to get up and drive over to pick Leslie up. That was not a good idea, the two girls agreed. At about 2:20 a.m. Leslie hung up the phone and walked back to her house. She sat down on the family’s picnic bench out back and must have been wondering what to do next when Bernardo emerged out of the shadows.
Standing before her was a handsome, blond, young man with an angelic face. Leslie asked, “What are you doing here?” Bernardo told her that he was burglarizing houses in the neighborhood.210
The rebellious 14-year-old’s response was, “Cool.”
They chatted for a while and Leslie explained to Bernardo that she was locked out of her house. She then asked Bernardo for a cigarette. Paul replied that he had some in his car, which was parked on the next street. They walked over to his vehicle. Bernardo invited her to sit down inside his car. She agreed, but cautiously told him that she would keep the door open. She sat in the passenger seat with her legs dangling out on the road, smoking the cigarette that Bernardo had given her. He sat in the driver’s seat. At one point, Leslie turned toward the open door to blow some smoke out. At that instant Bernardo struck like a snake: He leaned over and placed a knife around her throat and ordered her to lift her legs into the car. Bernardo then pushed her into the rear seat, blindfolded her, and threw a blanket over her. He then calmly drove thirty-five miles back to his home at Port Dalhousie, assuring Leslie that if she did everything he told her, no harm would come to her.
As soon as Bernardo got Leslie into the house, he set up his videocamera and began taping his beating, raping, sodomizing, and tormenting the girl. As the video camera rolled, Leslie was punched, slapped, her nipples were twisted by Bernardo, she was forced to urinate before the camera, to perform fellatio (with warnings from Bernardo not to scratch him with her braces), and was repeatedly raped and sodomized. She was blindfolded all the time. Fearing that she would be killed if she got another look at her assailants, every time the blindfold came loose, Leslie would alert Bernardo. She is seen in the video begging Bernardo not to kill her and cries that she desperately wants to see her baby brother again.
During this time Karla sat downstairs reading the Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho. Occasionally, when called, she would go upstairs and hold the videocamera while Bernardo repeatedly raped the girl. When asked in court during her cross-examination how she could possibly read while a girl was being tortured and raped upstairs, Karla missed the point of the question and incredulously replied that she was easily capable of doing two things at once.
It would be pointless, cruel, and perhaps even immoral to dwell on the detailed transcripts of the torture and rape inflicted on Leslie Mahaffy. From the video transcripts already quoted here, one can easily surmise what Karla and Bernardo put the girl through and what was said. If any reader should need the exact details of what was on the videotapes, they can refer to Toronto crime reporter Nick Pron’s book, Lethal Marriage. Pron made the difficult decision to publish the transcripts in their entirety, and one such source should be enough.
Leslie Mahaffy suffered for nearly twenty-four hours. Sometime in the middle of the night, while Leslie lay handcuffed in the bedroom upstairs, Bernardo and Homolka went down to the kitchen and had a conference. There was a problem: It was Father’s Day and Karla’s parents were expected for dinner later in the day, their first visit to the house Karla and Paul had recently rented. According to Karla, Bernardo decided that he had to kill Leslie because she would identify him if he let her go. Homolka says that she insisted on going upstairs and feeding Leslie sleeping pills so she would not feel anything when she died. Karla gave Leslie a teddy bear named Bunky that Bernardo had given her, to comfort the girl as she curled up in a fetal position and went to sleep. Then, Homolka says, Bernardo entered the room with a black electric cord, wrapped it around Leslie’s throat, and strangled her. A pool of urine formed under Leslie as she died on the carpeted floor of the Bernardo’s bedroom.
Bernardo ordered Homolka to destroy the pillowcases and blanket stained with Leslie’s blood. Homolka argued that they were her favorite set of bedding. She would carefully wash them instead.
Bernardo took Leslie’s body down to the basement and hid it in a cool corner. Then the couple went to bed to sleep as Leslie’s urine dried on their floor. Bernardo let Karla sleep in the bed that night. They got up toward noon and Karla bustled about preparing dinner for her parents. When the Homolkas arrived, Bernardo took them for a tour of the house, carefully avoiding the basement where Leslie’s body still lay.
On Monday morning, while Homolka went back to work at the clinic, Bernardo set up a clear plastic sheet in the form of a tent in the basement. He lined the bottom of it with sheets of newspaper. He then dragged Leslie’s body into the tent and carved it into ten pieces with a power saw. The entire interior of the tent was splattered from top to bottom with blood, tissue, and body fluid, which spilled out from the corpse. The electric saw was caked in flesh and bone. Bernardo attempted to wash it clean in the sink, but only succeeded in clogging up the drain with body matter.
Bernardo then went out and bought some quick-dry cement. Returning home, he encased the ten body parts into blocks of cement, and then stacked them in the basement. Leaving the bloodied tent still standing, he went to the animal clinic and picked up Karla. He took her down to the basement and had her put away the tent and clean out the body tissue and hair from the drain. Homolka testified that she used lemon-scented Lysol cleaner to clean up the basement.
The couple then went upstairs and had dinner. Bernardo asked Homolka not to serve any meat for a while, but laughed and joked how light Leslie’s head was when he had cut it off.
The next evening, when Bernardo picked up Homolka from work, he told her that the concrete blocks were in the trunk of the car. The couple drove out to Lake Gibson, where they used to have sex when they were first dating, and threw the blocks into the water.
The remainder of the two weeks was busy for Homolka as she prepared the last details of her wedding. When she was being fitted for her wedding dress, several of her friends noticed the bruises on her arms, but Homolka explained that she got them from handling dogs at the clinic.
On Saturday, June 29, 1991, the lavish wedding took place at the exclusive tourist town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. While Niagara Falls is a trashy and carnivallike town, full of cheap motels, casinos, and souvenir stands on the site of the famous waterfalls, Niagara-on-the-Lake, twenty minutes away, is an elegant, Loyalist colonial settlement with an important theater center. At about the same time that Bernardo and Homolka were getting married, a fisherman was pulling out of Lake Gibson one of the concrete blocks Bernardo and Homolka had tossed in—the one they had not tossed far enough away from shore. That night, unaware that the police were piecing together Leslie Mahaffy’s body, Bernardo and Homolka counted the money they had collected during the wedding. They had nine thousand dollars to spend on their honeymoon in Hawaii.
On November 30, 1991, it is suspected that Karla and Paul might have kidnapped, drugged, and murdered 14-year-old Terri Anderson as she was leaving her church parking lot. Her body was found floating in the waters of Port Dalhousie. After finding traces of LSD in her system, however, the coroner officially ruled her death as accidental drowning.
The Murder of Kristen French
After the murder of Leslie Mahaffy, Bernardo spent the next ten months beating Homolka and stalking and raping other victims. On the Thursday afternoon before the Easter weekend of April 1992, Bernardo decided he needed another “virgin.” He told Homolka to put her hair into a nonthreatening ponytail and the two drove over to the Holy Cross Catholic high school, about half a mile from where Terri Anderson disappeared. Bernardo had already staked out the school. He was aroused by the school uniforms the girls wore: short plaid skirt, white blouse, and knee socks—a fairly common theme in erotic and pornographic media.
As students poured out of the school, Bernardo scanned the girls looking for one that suited his desire. He picked out 15-year-old Kristen French, a serious and studious young woman in grade 12. Bernardo followed her in his car. When he saw that she was walking alone, he passed her and pulled into a church parking lot just ahead. As Kristen came up toward the car, Karla called her over asking for directions. Standing in the open door of the auto, Karla had spread a map on the car’s roof and asked Kristen to show her where they were. Kristen felt no fear in approaching the handsome young couple. As she began to scan the map, Bernardo circled behind her and pushed her into the vehicle. While Homolka held Kristen down in the backseat, Bernardo drove to their home.
Bernardo and Homolka both sexually assaulted Kristen for a period of three days. As before, everything was videotaped. During the nights, they kept her drugged on sleeping pills, tied and locked in the closet.
In the video, Bernardo urinated on and attempted to defecate on Kristen and had her chant, “I’m your 15-year-old Holy Cross sex slave,” and “You’re the most powerful man in the world. You deserve anything you want…You’re so nice, powerful, sexy. So much in control of everything. Nobody can overpower you. Nobody…you’re the king. The master. The king of all kings. The best man in the whole world. It’s good that I’m getting punished.”
Bernardo had Karla put on Tammy’s similar schoolgirl uniform–type outfit and climb into bed with Kristen. He then ordered them to perform oral sex and masturbate each other. Bernardo barked out commands from behind the camera like a psychopathic film director: “Start licking at the bottom and work your way up to the top…Come on, let’s hear some love stuff.”
Karla told police in her interview:
“So we dressed in almost identical uniforms and we put on makeup and we were giggling and laughing and it seemed like we’re just friends getting ready to go out, kind of thing, we were doing what Paul had told us to do. I had all little perfume samples and she wanted to try some.”
One is immediately incredulous—the raped and beaten, captive victim wanted to try perfume samples! Ridiculous. But there it was in the videotapes, which surfaced later. As Homolka and Kristen stood in front of the bathroom mirror with cosmetics lined up on the counter, Bernardo switched on his video camera.
(Video recording starts.)
HOMOLKA: So what kind of perfume do you like?
KRISTEN: Eternity or Giorgio.
HOMOLKA: Yeah, I like Giorgio as well. I have some of that new perfume, Halston. I haven’t worn it yet, but maybe I will today.
BERNARDO: Okay, girls, you know what I want you to do. Each one of you pull up your skirts at the same time. Okay, now bend over. Give me a nice ass shot.
(Kristen does what she is told.)
BERNARDO: Good girls. Okay back to work.
HOMOLKA: Let’s see what we have here.
KRISTEN: Eternity.
HOMOLKA: Oh, Eternity. I like it. That’s Escape. I hate that one.
KRISTEN: Really? Can I smell it?
HOMOLKA: It’s gross.
KRISTEN: I’ve never used it.
HOMOLKA: I was at work one day, and I bought one of those magazines, like Mademoiselle, and then the whole place stunk because of that perfume in a page. I’ve got others here to try, like Alfred Sung.
KRISTEN: Can I try this one?
HOMOLKA: Sure.
Explaining the scenes recorded on the videotape, Homolka recounted in court how Bernardo held a contest between her and Kristen. They were instructed to select and put on makeup and perfumes. Bernardo explained, “The one who smells the best is the winner and won’t get fucked by me up the ass.”
BERNARDO: Tell the camera. Mmm, gorgeous, gorgeous.
(Bernardo leans forward and smells Kristen. He then smells Homolka.)
BERNARDO: No way, lady. This is not a nice smell.
HOMOLKA: (Sniffing Kristen’s neck.) That is a nice smell.
BERNARDO: (To Kristen.) Even though you smell the best, I’m still going to fuck you up the ass anyways. She’s my wife, after all. And she’s got brownie points on her side.*
The videotape revealed some surreal episodes in Kristen French’s three-day ordeal at the hands of Bernardo and Homolka. There were moments when one would not guess that Kristen was a captive in the hands of homicidal psychopaths who were raping her and were about to murder her.
Some of these horrific episodes are reproduced here because they illuminate the subtle dynamics between a victim and her killers—the razor’s edge between life and death at the hands of a serial killer. In the midst of her nightmarish ordeal, Kristen French cleverly and desperately attempts to survive and manipulate her captors. In one video segment, Kristen and Karla are videotaped by Bernardo having sex with each other:
HOMOLKA: I like you, Kristen.
KRISTEN: I like you, too.
HOMOLKA: Do you want to have some fun?
KRISTEN: Sure, okay. How come your teeth are so straight?
HOMOLKA: I don’t know. How about yours?
KRISTEN: (giggling) You’re silly.
HOMOLKA: (Undressing Kristen.) Don’t be so nervous. It’s okay.
KRISTEN: Am I shaking?
HOMOLKA: No. Just try to feel at home. You have nice legs.
KRISTEN: This one’s kind of short.
HOMOLKA: That’s okay.
KRISTEN: Can I ask you a favor? Before I leave, can I see your dog…without it attacking me?
(Homolka looks up toward Bernardo behind the camera.)
HOMOLKA: It’s up to him.
BERNARDO: Yeah, sure. Before you leave.
KRISTEN: I like dogs.
BERNARDO: Me, too.
Some interpreted Kristen French’s easygoing banter with Homolka and Bernardo as symptoms of her succumbing to Stockholm syndrome—where shocked and disorientated captives begin to relate to and associate themselves with their captors. In Kristen’s case, it is unlikely. It is clear from Kristen’s dialogue that she had her wits about her and was cleverly attempting to create a context in her relationship with her captors in which her release would be inevitable. Kristen positively said, “Before I leave, can I see your dog?” A courageous and brilliant attempt at survival and one that could have potentially worked had she been in the hands of serial killers with a slightly different profile.*
While Kristen was held captive, Bernardo would go out of the house on two occasions to get takeout food, leaving her alone with Homolka. The moment Bernardo was out the door, Kristen desperately pleaded with Karla to let her escape, but Karla refused.
“What Do You Know About Dying?”
On the third day, Kristen French began to openly resist Bernardo, refusing to obey his commands—not the behavioral path a Stockholm syndrome victim takes. Bernardo then showed her the videotape of Leslie Mahaffy being raped and tortured, saying to Kristen, “You know who that is, don’t you? What happened to her will happen to you if you don’t do what I tell you.”
Kristen was horrified to recognize the face of the girl who had been reported missing and had been found dismembered at Lake Gibson.
Despite the horror of recognizing Mahaffy, the courageous 15-year-old Kristen French refused to comply further with Bernardo’s perverted demands and defiantly countered, “There are some things worth dying for.”
Bernardo responded with a sustained cycle of vicious punches and kicks to her body. Homolka and Bernardo raped her again several more times before Bernardo commenced beating her yet again. One of the last images on the video was of Kristen lying tied up and battered almost into unconsciousness. On the video, she spits out at Bernardo: “I don’t know how your wife can stand being around you.”
“Just shut up, okay. Just shut up,” Bernardo is heard saying on the video, just before turning the camera off.
Shortly afterward, Bernardo took an electrical cord and wrapped it around Kristen’s throat. He carefully timed himself for seven minutes as he held his grip. Karla says she heard Bernardo whisper in Kristen’s ear as he killed her: “What do you know about dying?”
If in Dante’s Inferno there was a “He-Said-She-Said Psycho Newlyweds Game Show,” then Bernardo and Homolka would have been star contestants. While Homolka testified that Bernardo killed the girls, Bernardo stated that Homolka killed both of the girls when he left them alone with her. Bernardo said he wanted to keep Kristen French as a sex slave and not kill her. Homolka became jealous, he asserts, and killed Kristen. This is conceivable, for along with American Psycho, the other book that Bernardo had on hand at the time was Perfect Victim, by Christine McGuire and Carla Norton. The book was a true-crime account of a 20-year-old woman who was kidnapped in California and kept as a sex slave for seven years by a married couple. Furthermore, the autopsy report on Leslie Mahaffy showed bruising on her back consistent with a pair of knees pressed there the size and shape of Karla’s.
Karla testified that Bernardo had killed Kristen because the couple was due at her parents’ house for Easter dinner. She stated that Bernardo had forced her to clean up the evidence. Because there might be carpet fibers in Kristen’s hair from Bernardo’s rug, rather than destroying her precious rug, Karla stupidly hacked off Kristen’s hair and collected it in a bag. She and Bernardo then carried her body into the bathroom and submerged it in the tub. She was scrubbed clean, because Bernardo told Karla that the police were able to lift fingerprints from flesh. He ordered Karla to douche Kristen’s vagina and anus of Bernardo’s seminal fluids. Bernardo burned her clothes, hair, and the sports bag she was carrying in the fireplace, and then collected the ashes. He meticulously wiped clean the glass face of Kristen’s watch, and then shattered it.
To make it seem like the killers lived in Burlington, where Mahaffy had been kidnapped, Homolka and Bernardo planned to dump Kristen’s body on Leslie Mahaffy’s grave, but they couldn’t find it. In the end, they tossed Kristen out by an illegal dumpsite. She was found naked and shorn of her hair fourteen days after she had gone missing.
Bernardo and Homolka went on for another eight months. There were beatings, Bernardo was out stalking and raping women, Homolka and he engaged prostitutes for three-way sex. Bernardo was drinking heavily and beating Karla almost daily, and was now striking her in the face and pulling out clumps of her hair. Once Bernardo threw her down into the cold cellar, turned off the light, and bolted the door, screaming down to his terrified wife, “Leslie’s coming for you! She’s down there in the basement. Right where I cut her up.” Karla spent the night locked in the dark basement.
Bernardo drove around with Karla in the car, pointing out women he was stalking and telling her he was going to rape them next. Once, while watching a woman on the street, he masturbated, making Karla look the other way. At other times, he had Karla perform fellatio on him as he watched his potential victims. She stupidly stood by her man.
“I Hope They Let Me Do My Hair in Jail. I Would Just Die If My Hair Went to Hell.”
Bernardo owned a Mag-Lite—a long-handled flashlight manufactured out of solid gun barrel–hard steel. They are carried by many police officers because of their durability and usefulness as a baton. There are several cases of individuals being killed from blows of a Maglite wielded by a police officer. When Bernardo began to beat Karla with the flashlight, she finally ran. Bruised and swollen, she showed up at her parents’ house on January 5, 1993. They immediately took her to an emergency ward at a hospital and Bernardo was charged with assault that night.
So that Bernardo could not find her, the Homolkas sent her to Toronto to stay with her aunt and uncle. There the tenants of the building nicknamed the mysterious blonde with the bruises under her eyes “Raccoon Face.” Within weeks, however, Homolka was out partying at a disco and quickly found herself a new lover. She told him nothing about her past other than that she was going through a “bad divorce.”
In the meantime, Bernardo was rambling around the empty house, shouting for Karla. “Snuggle Bunny, are you home, Karly Curls?” He recorded a videotape directed to Karla in which he threatened suicide: “I need you, Kar. I love you, my princess, my queen, my everything. I think about you every day now…I realize now you’re never coming back. Fucking kills me, pal. I wish I just could have been given a second chance to make things right…I know you had to leave, and I don’t blame you. In fact, it was the best thing you could have done for me. It snapped me out of whatever state I was in. It made me realize how much I care for you…You are the most special person who ever touched my life. Yes, even more than Tammy. When you know you’ve lost it all, and there’s no one to turn to, death’s welcome mat is the only place you can go…Okay, I fucked up this life, right? When I go to the other side, okay, I’m going to make it better for you there. I’m going to set something up real nice. So when you come, it’ll be all right. You know what I’m saying?”
When it ended, it ended fast, but dirty. Bernardo had been one of the many suspects in the Scarborough rapes and had resigned himself to giving police his DNA sample when his description matched that of the rapist. Three weeks after Karla left Bernardo, a DNA sample finally came back to the police. In the wake of government-funding cutbacks, it had taken twenty-six months to run the tests. Paul Bernardo, the polite young accountant, was their man. The police immediately erected a twenty-four-hour surveillance around Bernardo. They followed him as he stalked women in his car.
When the police discovered that Bernardo was living in the Niagara region, it was not long before they began to suspect him of the Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French murders. Detectives visited Karla Homolka and asked her if she had ever cut anyone’s hair and whether she was ever in the church parking lot from which French was kidnapped (without telling Homolka why they were asking). Homolka was in a state of panic. On February 17, 1993, Bernardo was arrested and charged with the Scarborough rapes.
Homolka broke down and made a full confession to her aunt and uncle. She was immediately taken to a lawyer. The police, meanwhile, began a forensic search of Bernardo’s house for evidence. Wearing spacemanlike suits so that they did not contaminate the site, the police forensic technicians tore out the walls, they drilled holes in the floor, they wrenched out the plumbing, they ripped out the carpeting, pried loose the baseboards, vacuumed up every loose hair and piece of lint, and dusted every square inch for fingerprints. The police technicians spent seventy-two days inside the Port Dalhousie death house—and found little to nothing with which to link Bernardo to the murders of the two girls.
Karla Homolka, in the meantime, had been told by everybody—doctors, police, nurses, social workers, family, and friends, all unaware of her role in the crimes—that obviously she was a battered wife. She was a victim here. Soon Homolka began to believe it herself and cleverly read up on battered woman syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder, mastering the jargon and its symptoms. In describing her relationship with Bernardo, Karla frequently used the terms “cycle of abuse” and “learned helplessness,” terms set out in Lenore Walker’s definitive 1979 book, The Battered Woman. Whenever police would come up with something Homolka had neglected to mention, like, for example, her luring and drugging—on her own initiative—of Jane Doe for Bernardo to rape, Homolka would claim post-traumatic stress–related memory loss as a result of her victimization by Bernardo. Despite the fact that Karla was living at home with her family and Bernardo was visiting her only on weekends, Karla claimed she was helpless to resist Paul’s demands to assist him in the Christmas drugging and rape of her little sister.
When Karla Homolka’s lawyer came forward with her offer to testify against Bernardo in exchange for a lenient sentence, the prosecutors readily accepted for they had come up with no evidence in the house linking Bernardo with Mahaffy and French. For a guilty plea to manslaughter and her testimony against Bernardo, Homolka negotiated a sentence of twelve years. She would be eligible for parole in four years, and if denied, eligible for automatic statutory release in eight under Canadian penal law. The prosecution agreed not to contest her parole application.
While these negotiations with Homolka were taking place, Bernardo sent his lawyer to the Port Dalhousie home with a hand-drawn map he had prepared, once the police search was over. Left alone in the house, the lawyer went up to the bathroom, got up on the vanity, unscrewed a ceiling lamp, reached in with his hand under the roof insulation, and withdrew a bundle of six small Hi-8 video cassettes—the rape and torture videos that the police failed to find in their seventy-two-day search of the small house! The lawyer then promptly concealed the existence of the tapes for fifteen months. He had recovered the tapes a week before the deal with Homolka had been made by the prosecutors. Had the tapes been turned over to them then, a deal with Karla might not have been necessary.
Karla testified against Bernardo, portraying herself as just one more of his victims. Her testimony, however, was hardly necessary—the tapes that Paul and Karla made were entered into evidence in court, shown only to the jury, while the spectators and press heard the audio. The jury saw Karla willingly participating and enjoying the rapes and tortures of the victims. But there was nothing they could do. The deal was done.
Paul Bernardo admitted to raping the girls. In view of the videotapes, he could take no other position. He denied, however, killing Mahaffy and French. He insisted that both girls died while in Karla’s custody. Near the end of his testimony, Bernardo admitted that he had some “problems” with his sexuality. “Down the road, I’m going to have to seek professional help for it,” Bernardo flatly stated, not understanding why a wave of scornful laughter rippled through the courtroom.
Bernardo was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 (Canada has no death penalty) and he will not be eligible for parole for twenty-five years. It is unlikely that he will ever get it.
In chatty letters from prison to her friends, Homolka wrote on her arrival there: “There are some people, like you, who know that this horror is not of my own making.” She wrote that prison was an opportunity for her to take some university courses: “I want you to know that life in here isn’t as bad as most people think…Hopefully, I’ll be able to finish my degree while I’m here. I’m eligible for parole in four years and intend to be out—for sure!” Her only worry about prison: “I hope they let me do my hair in jail. I would just die if my hair went to hell.”
Karla did not get out in four years, nor in eight. Public indignation over the deal and a constant barrage of media coverage of Karla’s every prison party, her lesbian relationships, her love affair with a male prisoner convicted of murdering his girlfriend, her prison psychiatric file, her personal letters and photographs, forced the correctional system to keep Karla in prison until she had served her full term of twelve years. Her mandatory release on Independence Day in July 2005 received frenzied helicopter-convoy coverage in Canada. The media dogged her for another six months or so and then tired of it. She lives somewhere in Montreal under the name of Teale, a name she and Paul Bernardo had adopted shortly before their arrests, based on the serial killer portrayed by Kevin Bacon in the movie Criminal Law—Martin Thiel, one of their favorites.
Despite the public fear that Karla will reoffend or become a homicidal muse for another serial killer, the prognosis for never hearing about her again is good, unless the press ferrets her out at a bus stop, doing nothing other than waiting for a bus, which is what they precisely did recently.* Statistically speaking, high-profile female offenders like Karla, who either escaped prison or were released, have not been discovered committing a new series of crimes. Charlene Gallego continues to live in anonymity—hopefully in innocent anonymity.
Everest
Explaining Karla is a more difficult task. There is nothing in her history prior to meeting Bernardo that is common to that of other serial killers (or psychopaths for that matter). In prison, Karla had been administered practically every psychological test known to man and scored normal profiles. Her score on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) was five; a score of at least twenty is required to designate the subject as a psychopath.211 On the other hand, while in prison Karla completed a degree from Queen’s University in psychology, including courses in deviant psychology. She could have manipulated her responses to the tests.
Homolka remains a mystery. It was not so much that Homolka was evil, as she was vacant. She was as colorless and as soul-dead as the anonymous housing tracts and shopping malls she and her Exclusive Diamond Club friends inhabited. Karla was conscious of only her Beastie Boy “right to party.” Her family was a numb and shriveled middle-middle-class hive of greed. All her poor sister Tammy wanted for her sixteenth birthday was a Porsche—something usually just beyond the means of the middle-middle. Karla Homolka could rattle off cosmetic-counter brand names in the midst of an unfolding rape-homicide, but was incapable of the simplest moral judgment—of not submitting her sister to a rape; of releasing a frightened and battered girl when she had the power to. Her capacity to do the right thing was totally extinct.
For Homolka, Bernardo was as perfect as the cover of a cheap romance novel—a blond, large, nicely styled Big Bad Businessman. His values were as vacant as hers and as such, they made a perfect couple. The walls of Bernardo’s study were covered with pictures of expensive sports cars and slips of paper with slogans like “Poverty is self-imposed.” “Time is Money.” “Money never sleeps.” “Think big. Be big.” “I don’t meet the competition—I crush it.” “Poverty sucks.” Wall Street was his favorite movie.
The horror is that there probably was not an ounce of murder in Karla Homolka’s heart before she met Bernardo, and probably none remains today. Yet on contact with a Bernardo, a vapid and vacant little Barbie princess like Karla becomes an effective homicidal bitch. We know that there are lots of Paul Bernardos out there, but one wonders: How many young men and women are out there—with moral discretion as malnourished as Homolka’s—waiting to meet their mate?
Some might argue that until Bernardo met Karla he had not committed any rapes or murders; until Ian Brady met Myra Hindley; until Doug Clark met Carol Bundy. Were these women—as women sometimes tend to do when killing—using these men as their proxies for their own homicidal desires? Possibly. Would these men have gone on to rape and kill if they had not met these women? Very likely. One thing we know for sure, however, in modern history there has not been a single known case of a Karla Homolka or a Myra Hindley or a Charlene Gallego without a male. (The notable exception, perhaps, is the lesbian female team of Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine May Wood, who murdered elderly patients in a retirement home for sexual thrills.)
Although he applied it to the victims as well as accomplices of females, as Patrick Wilson concluded in his study of Home Office statistics of nearly every woman executed in Britain since 1843, “The husband or lover of a murderess invariably plays a part in causing the murder, if only, because, like Everest, he is there. The same cannot be said of male crimes of violence.”212