Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The Ken and Barbie Killers

Is there anything more wholesome than a little girl or boy playing with their dolls? Sure, boys tend to call them action figures, but we all know they’re the same thing. The only difference between them is that Barbie has had over 200 jobs requiring about 50 different PhDs while G.I. Joe has only ever had one job: oorah!

Unfortunately, there is nothing wholesome about the subjects of today’s episode. Fair warning both to you Simon and to our listeners that this episode is probably going to be pretty rough, and it’s going to start almost immediately, long before any of the murders take place.

The Bastard from Hell

In order to fully understand Paul Bernardo, we need to at least somewhat understand his parents, Marilyn and Kenneth. Marilyn was the adopted daughter of a successful lawyer and his wife, and she is said to have come from a good home. But because her father was a lawyer, he understood that there was something far more important than love or happiness: money.

Marilyn was considering marrying her high school sweetheart, Bill, but her father would not allow it because Bill did not have the means to support her. Instead, her father pushed her to marry another man she had known, Kenneth Bernardo. Ken’s father was a successful business owner, and Ken was going to college to become an accountant which meant he’d be able to provide for Marilyn.

That’s pretty messed up, but Marilyn was always grateful that she had been adopted into such a well off family, so she complied with her father’s wishes and in 1960 married Ken Bernardo. Had Marilyn’s father been aware that Ken’s father was abusive both to his wife and children, perhaps he would have made a different decision for her.

After their marriage, Ken wasted no time in becoming a physically and verbally abusive alcoholic. This completely destroyed her self confidence, and she would tell her friends how thankful she was that Ken had loved her enough to marry her. Of course, her friends noticed what a drastic change in personality she was exhibiting, but there was nothing they could do.

In 1961, Ken and Marilyn had their first son, Dave, and the following year they had a daughter, Debbie. Paul would be born two years later, but not without considerable drama. While Marilyn may have been unwilling or more likely unable to leave her husband, she still sought refuge from the constant abuse. And it was in the arms of her former boyfriend, Bill, that she would find that reprieve.

It’s unclear exactly when Ken became aware of the affair, but he seemed to accept it and chose to be listed as Paul’s biological father on the birth certificate, even though this wasn’t true. And though I say he accepted it, I just mean he didn’t divorce Marilyn and leave her alone with the three kids; I don’t imagine the drunk, abusive piece of shit was particularly forgiving of her getting pregnant by another man.

But it wasn’t just the family drama that complicated Paul’s birth. There was a lack of oxygen to his brain in utero resulting in him being born with aphasia. Aphasia is a disorder that affects the language portion of the brain making it difficult to speak and understand written or spoken language. It can be caused by any sort of damage to the language processing centers of the brain, including from stroke, tumors, or in the case of Paul from problems during development.

This was only made worse by another physical defect he was born with where his tongue was mostly fused to the roof of his mouth. Although Paul would eventually get surgery to free his tongue followed by speech therapy to help him learn to speak, for years he was only able to communicate with grunts and points.

By the time Paul was six years old, Marilyn and Kenneth’s marriage was becoming increasingly strained. Marilyn managed to track down her biological sisters and would visit them on weekends, leaving the kids alone with Kenneth. Allegedly, anyway. It’s a bit unclear whether she genuinely found her siblings or if that was just the cover story she used to get out of the house and see her old boyfriend. But even when she was home, she had moved into the basement to stay as far from her abusive husband as possible.

This division amongst their parents deeply affected Dave and Debbie, but the younger Paul seemed completely unfazed by it. He was likely too young to understand that what was going on at his house wasn’t completely normal. The only part that seemed to affect Paul at that age was that Marilyn became so withdrawn, depressed, and eventually agoraphobic that she neglected her children. They would often go without food or clean clothing, which meant that he was the smelly kid in school.

Nobody wants to be friends with the smelly kid, and this not only crushed Paul’s self confidence but it stunted his social development. It also meant that, since he didn’t have any friends, there was nobody to tell him that what was going on at his house not only wasn’t normal, but was completely horrific and criminal.

You see, Kenneth had no reason to care that Marilyn spent her days hiding from him in the basement, because he had his eye on other girls, including his daughter Debbie. During family movie nights, he would sexually abuse her in front of the rest of the family. Debbie also took to sleeping with empty cans and food wrappers all over her bed and her room so that she would wake up if Kenneth tried to enter her room while she slept, and she had to always make sure the blinds were drawn when she got dressed or else he would be outside her window masturbating.

But Kenneth’s unforgivable behaviour wasn’t restricted just to Debbie. Neighbours would catch him prowling around in his pajamas trying to peek inside girls’ bedroom windows, and in 1975 he was charged in connection with abusing another child. He wound up pleading guilty to one count of indecent assault on a female under the age of 14, a crime for which he received a suspended sentence and two years of probation. This almost certainly would only help to further distort Paul’s view of the world.

Paul had already grown up thinking that everything that happened in his house was normal, and now he was being shown that even if it wasn’t normal, it certainly didn’t carry with it any consequences.

Around the same time as his father’s arrest, Paul became friends with three other boys in his neighbourhood: Van, Alex, and Steve Smirnis. They were always together both around the neighbourhood and in their local Boy Scout troop. By this point, Paul was beginning to become more social. He had an outward appearance of always being happy and smiling, and adults all loved him because he was such a beautiful and cheerful child with his bright blue eyes and dimpled cheeks.

He was polite, well behaved, and excelling at school, which made him the sort of child every parent wished their own kids could be more like.

But underneath all that was obviously something much darker. Paul had developed a bit of pyromania, and he and the Smirnis brothers began setting fires. Nothing major, mind you; they were just using magnifying glasses to set fire to twigs and kindling. Considering that Paul was only 11 at the time and his friends were of similar ages, I wouldn’t necessarily find this too unusual.

It’s definitely something I did as a kid, probably when I was younger than Paul was, but it’s also not something I made a habit of. Just like I imagine many other kids did, I tried this once to see if it really worked or if it was one of those things that only happened in cartoons. I can’t say with certainty how often Paul and his friends were starting fires this way, but the fact that it’s always cited as a key aspect of his childhood would lead me to believe they did it with disturbing regularity, rather than just once or twice for the sake of science.

In 1979, at the age of 15, Paul began high school. By this point, his life had changed dramatically from his early school years. He was no longer the smelly kid everybody hated that had trouble communicating. Once he learned to talk he pretty much never shut up, and in high school he was regarded as a silver tongued devil.

Of course, just because they were in a new building, that didn’t mean his old classmates had forgotten who he was. Paul was in a few fights early on in high school, but he suddenly shot up to six feet tall and began lifting weights. As it turns out, bullies try to only pick fights with people when they know they can win. With Paul now adequately able to defend himself, the fighting stopped and he was able to start doing what he did best: making everybody love him.

At the end of his freshman year of high school, Paul began dating his first girlfriend, a classmate by the name of Nadine Brammer. She was the first girl that he slept with, but whatever joy he felt was quickly going to come crashing down. You see, there’s still the matter of Paul’s father, Bill.

Paul was completely unaware of it, but there was another man out there somewhere that was his biological father. They had even been in the same room together many times. Marilyn had occasionally taken Paul with her to the McDonald’s in Kitchener, over an hour away. Every time they went there, Bill would be sitting in the corner so that he could see his son. He had begged Marilyn for the chance to at least see Paul, but as they agreed Bill never spoke a word to him.

Even though Paul never had any suspicions about his life, at the age of 16 he was about to find out. There was a fight in the Bernardo household, the details of which are unclear. While there are wildly different accounts of who was fighting and over what, the end result was that Marilyn told Paul that Kenneth was not his real father. This was devastating to Paul, who immediately ran out of the house and went to see his friend, Van.

He arrived at his friend’s house, practically in tears, as he explained what happened. Paul pointed out all the facial similarities between Kenneth and his brother Dave, saying how his face was different than both of theirs. The revelation had seemed to break him, and he claimed that he now understood the resentment he had felt from his father for his entire life.

Not only was this a crippling blow to Paul’s psyche, but it completely destroyed his relationship with his mother. The Bernardo home had always been a nightmare, especially for Debbie, but daily life was about to get much more tense. Paul would constantly call Marilyn a “big fat cow”, a “whore”, and a “fucking cunt”. If she ever asked him to do anything around the house, his reply was simply “fuck off”, even if there was company present. In turn, Marilyn began referring to him as “the bastard from Hell.”

Things were no longer going well with Nadine, either. Kenneth may not have been Paul’s biological father, but he was still the man that raised him. It’s no surprise then that Paul was extremely controlling in his relationship with Nadine. She wound up leaving him for Steve, one of Paul’s closest friends. In retaliation, Paul took everything of Nadine’s that was in his house and set it all on fire.

His relationship wasn’t the first time that he was seen to be taking after Kenneth, either. From the age of 10, Paul had begun amassing a large collection of pornography. That’s a little young to be stockpiling porn, but it’s not the craziest thing. About 10% of the world’s forests are in Canada, and everybody knows that all woods are absolutely littered with porno magazines; maybe he just started the collection by chance after finding some in the woods.

Of course, Paul didn’t stop with just magazines. When the printed images weren’t enough, he decided to take a page out of his father’s book and just peer into girl’s windows. One woman caught him when he was 10 but decided not to tell his parents because Paul seemed so embarrassed. Later, he would be caught again with the victim saying in her report to the police, “Like father, like son.”

Paul didn’t have any other important relationships throughout the rest of high school, but he certainly had the attention of women. Despite how things had ended with Nadine, thanks to his good looks and charm, Paul felt like he could have any girl he wanted. He wasn’t alone either. Everybody who met him thought that, and girls would do seemingly anything for his attention and approval.

And if everybody seems to agree that you can get any girl you want into your bed effortlessly, well what better alibi could there be?

The Scarborough Rapist

Paul graduated high school in 1982, and from there his life started to get really busy. He would be attending the University of Toronto that fall to begin a degree in accounting, just like his father, but he still had an entire summer to kill. He needed to make some money, so he picked up a couple jobs, both of which he would continue doing while in college.

One of his jobs was smuggling cigarettes from the United States to Canada. I’m surprised that they were cheaper here than in Canada, especially since he was crossing the border into New York which is currently the most expensive state to buy them in, but it was a different time. He would move the smuggled goods with the help of the Smirnis brothers, as they were a family of petty criminals. One of the crimes they enjoyed, and possibly the most Canadian crime ever, was trading contraband for access to illegal fishing on private property.

Paul’s other job was working for Amway. If you’re unfamiliar with Amway, short for “American Way”, it’s a multi-level marketing company that sells health and beauty products. As an MLM it is legally distinct from a pyramid scheme, and they have paid tens of millions of dollars in settlements around the world so as to avoid ever being found guilty of pyramid scheme practices. So let’s just leave it at that.

Anyway, Paul was enthralled by the sales culture of the company, and he dove in head first. He began buying any books and tapes he could from famous motivational speakers and “get rich quick” gurus, and he was taking their lessons to heart. He also realized that many of the same techniques that worked in sales could work in dating. One such technique that he and Van would employ was to simply lie. The friends would go to bars and lie to women to get them into bed, to great success.

During this time, Paul also began to tell Van about his sexual desires. He had developed a lot of darker sexual fantasies involving force, humiliation, and degradation. But amongst all his fantasies, the one that excited him most was the idea of having his very own “virgin farm”. It would be his own plot of land where he could bring virgins to rape them and breed more virgins to use. He admitted this to Van, yet the two remained friends for another 10 years or so.

For the next few years Paul would continue with both his jobs, attending college, and picking up girls. He would enter into relationships, and at first the girls would seem willing to do anything to keep him happy. But eventually, his violent and abusive behaviour would become too much and they would all leave him. Each relationship became shorter than the previous one as Paul was becoming increasingly aggressive and controlling.

His girlfriends would describe the things that he did to them in bed. During sex Paul would choke them with cords or hold knives to their throat. He would also engage in aggressive anal sex with them, ostensibly without their consent. This was his favourite type of sex, probably because it was so painful and humiliating for an unwilling participant. For the rest of the episode, anytime he assaults someone just assume that particular act is a major part of it.

And of course, Paul would also threaten to kill the girls he dated if they told anybody what he had done to them. There were other threats as well, such as making a girl pose nude for Polaroids then threatening to post them on her church’s bulletin board if she turned on him.

While not physically abusive in public, his behaviour towards his girlfriends was absolutely vile. He would constantly humiliate them publically, and in one instance he made a girl wear a shirt that said “hands off” on the front and “property of Paul” on the back. Some of you listening, though probably not Simon, might hear about that shirt and think that there are certain situations where a person could see something like that as kind of cute, but I promise you it was not one of those situations.

Even once the girls broke up with Paul, he didn’t want to be done with them. He would make obscene phone calls to his ex-girlfriends, and for some reason to one of Van’s exes as well. Despite wanting to harass the girls for breaking up with him, it’s not like Paul was being faithful to his girlfriends anyway.

Paul began dating a girl named Carol who he cheated on constantly. He then began dating another girl named Suzie while still with Carol, and the two eventually found out about one another. But Paul was so controlling, manipulative, and abusive, that both of them stayed with him even after finding out that he had two girlfriends.

This wouldn’t last, and Paul found himself being slapped with a restraining order from Carol because of all his obscene phone calls. Van’s ex-girlfriend also took out a restraining order against him, so in a perfect world the police would have already had some number of red flags associated with Paul’s name.

When Paul had nearly finished college, he had a bit of trouble with his girlfriend Jennifer. Jennifer had zero interest in putting up with his shit or giving in to his demands, and she threatened to go to the police. He started to slow down with his dating, but he also realized that he didn’t need to date the girls anyway.

To be clear, even though they had purportedly been in relationships, Paul was still raping and abusing the girls he dated. At least some of these victims were in high school while Paul was in college, but they all knew him and were too afraid or ashamed to contact the police. Now, with his last victim threatening to do just that, he decided to just cut out all of the relationship nonsense and skip straight to the only part he cared about.

Immediately after college, Paul began working as a junior accountant at Price Waterhouse in Toronto, only a 20 minute or so commute from Scarborough. The job paid very well, but he wanted more. Paul loved being a total fucking scumbag, so he kept smuggling cigarettes as a way to make more money. He had his career in order, in a manner of speaking anyway, but he hadn’t really been dating. So it was now time for the police and the media to be introduced to the Scarborough rapist.

But first a quick side note. It’s important to remember and focus on the victims, rather than glorifying criminals. We all tend to be pretty vocal on this show about what disgusting pieces of shit the criminals are, unless it’s a light-hearted heist episode, so I don’t think we’re in danger of glorifying the criminals. However in terms of remembering the victims, I won’t be including the names of any of these rape victims.

I was only able to track down some of their names, and those ones were hard enough to find that I have to assume it was intentionally difficult. As such, it is only the later victims in this episode that will be named.

Paul began his spree on May 4, 1987. He stalked a 21 year old woman from a bus station as she walked home before attacking her in front of his parents’ house. Only 10 days later he would strike again. This time the victim was a 19 year old who he assaulted in her parents’ backyard after again following her from the bus station, and this attack would last for over an hour. This was important for a couple reasons.

First, Paul liked to take his time and take what he wanted from the girls. But more notably, he wasn’t being at all careful. Sure he chose people that were alone, but he wasn’t taking them anywhere, not even to his car. The attacks were happening over extended periods of time in their yards. It may have been night, but it obviously wasn’t so late that the buses had stopped running so it would hardly be impossible for a neighbour or the girls’ parents to hear the commotion outside and catch Paul in the act.

For whatever reason, he seemed to think he was invincible. Probably because he had witnessed the same sort of behaviour from his father, and the man had faced no repercussions for his actions. Paul showed such little regard for the possibility he could ever be caught that he never even bothered to wear a mask or a condom. DNA evidence may have been brand new, but it made world news the previous year when it was used in court for the first time, in a case involving child rape no less.

Paul would attempt to strike again just a couple months later, savagely beating a woman he found at a bus stop, but he ran away when she started to fight back.

The next attack on September 29 was a bit different than all the others. This was the only time that he broke into a victim’s house to attack them. After breaking in, Paul went to the bedroom of his target, a 15 year old girl, and jumped on her back, covering her mouth with his hand. He pulled out his knife to threaten her and bit her ear, but fortunately the girl’s mother came into the room and screamed, causing Paul to flee.

Unfortunately, somebody else would be wrongfully convicted of this attack and serve 16 months in jail, not being exonerated until 2006.

Although Paul had begun stalking and raping strangers, he still enjoyed going out with the lads and using his charm to pick up girls. I mentioned earlier that Van didn’t seem particularly bothered by Paul’s desire to have a virgin farm, even though that’s the sort of thing I normally think would make somebody question their friendship with whoever said it. However, it turned out than Van also had a thing for young girls, and one night in October the pair decided they were going to go out in search of some.

And there was no better place in Scarborough to find underage girls then the restaurant at the local Howard Johnson hotel. I guess. I thought hotel bars and restaurants were where you went to find middle aged people searching for a one night escape from a stale or loveless marriage, but these two were the experts and they found exactly what they were looking for.

The 23 year old Paul looked across the restaurant and was immediately struck by the sight of a beautiful, blonde girl eating a grilled cheese sandwich with her friend. He and Van went to introduce themselves, and it was there that Paul would meet 17 year old Karla Homolka for the first time. Karla worked part time at a pet store and was in town for a pet store conference. Karla and Paul had an immediate attraction, and they wasted no time in going back to her room.

Van wasn’t surprised, as Paul had no difficulty attracting women. What shocked him was that Paul had asked for Karla’s number, something he never did. Paul and Karla would see each other again the next month, and they started to develop a serious relationship. Paul would drive to visit her twice every week, and her parents didn’t have any problem with their teenage daughter dating someone six years older than her because he was just so charming and handsome.

Karla had always been exceptionally beautiful, and she finally had someone that looked like the Ken to her Barbie. And yes, the fact that they were both extremely attractive is really why they were named the Ken and Barbie Killers.

Although even if the two looked like the perfect couple, Paul didn’t think they were yet. Or rather, he didn’t think that Karla was yet. If she was going to be perfect, Paul was going to have to run every aspect of her life for her.

Karla had gone through a bit of a goth phase, and that was definitely over; she could not dye her hair and had to remain her natural blonde. She would also have to style her hair the way Paul told her to, dress the way he told her to, only talk to the people he permitted, have the opinions he told her to have, and only eat what he told her too. That meant a lot less grilled cheese and a lot more salad, since Paul enjoyed telling her how fat and ugly she was and made her call herself these names, including in bed.

But despite having control over every aspect of Karla’s life now, there was one thing Paul was disgusted by that he couldn’t change: she hadn’t been a virgin before they met. It was the sort of thing that he would normally have found unforgivable. A previous girl he dated briefly said how angry Paul was at her for not being a virgin, and one night even drove her somewhere secluded so he could whip her ass with his belt while forcing her to apologize for having slept with anyone before him.

But Karla was submitting completely to his will and his dark sexual fantasies, so he wanted to stay with her. He would just have to continue finding his virgins elsewhere.

While dating Karla, Paul continued his string of assaults. On December 16, 1987, he targeted a 15 year old victim while she was getting off the bus. It was after this attack that the media officially coined the term Scarborough Rapist, which is of course a double edged sword. It’s good for people to know about very real threats like this, but narcissistic serial offenders also thrive off this sort of attention and are emboldened by it.

Only one week after that attack, On December 23, Paul struck again. This time he raped a 17 year old girl with the knife that he used to threaten his victims. After that, it was off to Mississauga, Ontario to spend Christmas with his lovely new underage girlfriend of two months and her family.

Now what exactly is an appropriate Christmas present for someone you’ve only been seeing for two months? I have absolutely no idea, and I’m stressed out just thinking about being in that situation. What I can say is that Paul and Karla both missed the mark given the circumstances, though one much more than the other.

For Christmas, Paul gave Karla a teddy bear, a gold necklace, and a $300 dress. Today that’s either $800 or $600 depending on whether the original number was in US or Canadian dollars, but either way that is insane after only two months with someone. It’s almost as if he was trying to buy her obedience and compliance by giving her expensive presents and taking her to fancy restaurants.

Karla’s present wasn’t nearly so extravagant, but she also got Paul the thing he would appreciate most, other than her virginity. With a minor rewrite and a completely different boyfriend, it’s the sort of present that actually seems pretty normal for a 17 year old to give their significant other. Karla presented Paul with a coupon that read, “Upon presentation of this coupon, Karla Leanne Homolka will perform sick, perverted acts upon Paul Kenneth Bernardo.

These acts may be chosen by the recipient of the coupon.” I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Paul did not get to open his present in front of the rest of the family.

Paul knew exactly what sick, perverted thing he wanted from Karla. He wanted to have his favourite type of sex with her, but Karla refused. This created a lot of tension between the pair for the next couple months, but they didn’t break things off. They continued to see each other and Paul continued to make further demands. For some reason he demanded that she give his penis a nickname, and she settled on “Snuffles”.

The pair were still only seeing each other twice a week since Paul lived in Scarborough and worked in Toronto, so they would write letters. In one letter sent shortly after Christmas, Karla included another coupon, because the first one had worked out so well. The coupon read, “The bearer will receive one cute little blonde 17 year old to put on her knees between his legs and satisfy his wishes.” This coupon was also accompanied by a letter:

“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 …[Multiple paragraphs of really sexually explicit stuff including repeated use of the name Snuffles]… 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.”

This letter might just speak to Paul’s skill at manipulation and control. It had only been about four months since they met and they already had a major disagreement over things Paul wanted to do to her that she refused to go along with, yet Karla was willing to proclaim her love for him to such an extent. She was even well aware that one of the things he liked about her was that she was underage, and instead of being creeped out she leaned into it in an attempt to regain the affection she was losing by failing to comply with his demand from Christmas.

It was around this time that Karla’s friends happened to find a pair of handcuffs in her room. These weren’t your typical “tee-hee we’re so naughty” fuzzy handcuffs with an emergency release button that can be pressed by the person being restrained either, they were legit police handcuffs. When questioned about them by her friends, she just laughed it off and said that Paul liked to play rough in the bedroom. Karla’s friends had never seen her as happy as when she started dating Paul, so they didn’t really think much of it at the time.

But Karla’s happiness wasn’t going to last. In February, Paul told her that he was thinking about breaking off the relationship since she hadn’t acquiesced to his demand. Given no alternative, Karla finally gave in. When Paul’s parents went out of town on vacation, he brought Karla to his house where he had a surprise in store for her.

She had already agreed to let Paul do his favourite thing to her, but he decided he wanted to up the ante. He took out his Polaroid camera and photographed her performing explicit acts on herself with a wine bottle before they engaged in sex together. While Paul was doing what he wanted to her, he wrapped an electrical cord around her neck and yanked it to pull her back and expose her neck, against which he placed an eight inch hunting knife. He told her not to worry and that they were just props that excited him.

In the end, Paul got to do whatever he wanted to her, because that was what he always did.

Two more important things happened around this time. In March one of Karla’s friends, Lisa, made another discovery in her bedroom, and it was one that she wasn’t able to dismiss as easily as the handcuffs. Lisa found a piece of paper in Karla’s handwriting known as “The List”. It started off by instructing her to eat healthy, exercise daily, and have good hygiene.

That’s all good advice and pretty normal stuff. I’m honestly surprised Lisa bothered to continue reading instead of just getting bored and putting the paper back. But as she continued reading, the list started talking about her relationship with Paul.

“Never let anyone know our relationship is anything but perfect

Don’t talk back to Paul

Be a perfect girlfriend for Paul

If Paul asks for a drink, bring him one quickly and happily

Remember you’re stupid

Remember you’re ugly

Remember you’re fat

I don’t know why I tell you these things because you never change.”

Given what we know about Paul so far, that may not be too shocking. It’s absolutely horrific, but sadly it isn’t surprising. What is shocking is that this was also around the time that Karla began to express her desire for Paul to marry her. Oh yeah, it was also around the same time that the police created the Scarborough Rapist Task Force, and they already had a ton of evidence.

The task force had DNA samples from his victims, eyewitness testimony, and a composite sketch based on the victims’ descriptions that looked a lot like Paul. Police even had a detailed report from a victim that contained accurate descriptions of Paul, the type of car he drove, the type of knife he used, and where he lived.

Unfortunately, computers weren’t commonplace yet so the handwritten report of that victim’s statements just got buried under other paperwork for years. Likewise, the task force never chose to publically release this sketch of their suspect. Paul continued facing zero repercussions for his actions, just like his father had, so he just kept on going. In April he would claim another victim, a 17 year old girl.

She tried to fight back, but he punched her several times before dragging her between two houses to rape her.

On May 25, Paul planned to strike again. This time, however, the police were waiting for him. He had a very clear modus operandi from which he had only deviated once: he would follow girls that were traveling home alone from a bus stop and attack them. The police correctly decided to stake out bus stops in the area where the attacks had been taking place, and on that night a uniformed police officer saw Paul lurking under a tree to monitor the bus stop.

The officer gave chase, but Paul managed to escape without the police officer getting a good look at his face.

Unfortunately, this didn’t deter him at all. His next victim would come only five days later, but instead of in Scarborough he chose to commit his crime in Mississauga while visiting Karla. Karla’s family had no idea what sort of monster they had invited into their home. Instead, they all absolutely adored him.

Her parents thought he was so handsome, well spoken, and had a bright future as an accountant. And most importantly he seemed to make Karla happy. Her two little sisters loved him as well, especially the youngest sister Tammy. Paul was so charismatic that the family seemed to believe anything that he told them, even when he talked about his upcoming career as a rap star.

He had recorded an album under the name Young Hype, and had Karla’s family convinced that record labels were trying to fight over which one would get to sign him.

That was emphatically not true, which would be immediately clear to anyone who listened to his so called music. His debut album, titled “Deadly Innocence”, was objectively garbage. His songs were all just him explaining that even though he was gorgeous, he was still hard as fuck. Young Hype was going to murder you and bang your wife, and he’d never be arrested because he was too pretty and innocent looking.

I’m not going to focus too much on his lyrics since, at the eventual trial, the judge ruled that his song lyrics couldn’t be admitted as evidence. That’s a hotly contested topic that comes up in courts all too often, and I think the judge made the right call.

But while the album shouldn’t be used as proof in a court of law, I think it does speak to how delusional and out of touch with reality Paul was. Part of it was of course just bravado, but against all logic and reason part of him really thought that he was going to take off as a rapper despite the fact that his lyrics were trash and he had no flow.

The rest of the summer was pretty quiet, but by October Paul needed to feed his urges again. He tried to claim another victim, but she was able to fight back and escape. However, this was also the first time that his violence escalated. Yes, I realize everything he’s done up until now was already extremely violent, but he went even further.

The knife he brought with him had always been an intimidation tactic to threaten and subdue his victims. This was the first time he actually used it, stabbing the fleeing girl once in the thigh and again in the butt, resulting in her getting 12 stitches.

October was also Paul and Karla’s one year anniversary which Karla commemorated by writing another letter for Paul, though this time there was no coupon included. She wrote, “Thanks for the best year of my life. You enriched my life beyond belief…” followed again by a bunch of really explicit stuff about Snuffles.

Paul thanked her by taking a second girlfriend in Toronto, Anna, though this relationship was short lived. In November Paul attacked another girl in the backyard of her house after following her home. This was his seventh rape as the Scarborough Rapist, not counting the girls that successfully fought him off or his supposed girlfriends from before he started attacking strangers.

Come December, it was time for Paul to spend Christmas with Karla’s family again. It was around this time that he started paying more attention to Karla’s sister, Tammy, who was about to turn 14 and who had a little schoolgirl crush on Paul. He demanded that Tammy not have sex with anyone, which is something I don’t even have words for. But shockingly, for the next six months or so, everything seemed to be pretty normal. Or at least as normal as anything could be in this ridiculous and highly abusive situation.

Karla was about to graduate high school, and she wanted to go study criminology at the University of Toronto to become a police detective. She had told people for much of her life that she wanted to be a cop, but Paul immediately shut it down. He told her that he was not going to let his wife work in a job as dangerous as that, and that was the end of the conversation.

They may not have been married or even engaged yet, but Karla had already said that she wanted Paul to marry her. Even though he was crushing one of her childhood dreams, his choice of words allowed her to hope that maybe he really would marry her if she kept obeying him. Besides, she also loved animals and had enjoyed her job at the pet store enough to travel to pet store conferences as a high school kid, so she decided to skip college and get a job as an assistant at a veterinary clinic in St. Catherine, nearly two hours away.

With Karla’s future now decided for her, all that was left was her graduation party. Once that was done, she could go begin her career far away from all of her family and friends. But the party didn’t go so smoothly. Paul had too much to drink, and he began accusing the boys at the party of flirting with Karla. This culminated in Paul essentially fighting the entire football team from Karla’s high school.

Obviously this was not a fight he was going to win, though sadly it was one he was going to survive. Paul supposedly got a couple good hits in, though for the most part he just got his own face bloodied. But he kept going and seemed to be enjoying the sheer violence of it all regardless of who was winning.

The only reason the fight seems to have ended is because everyone else just kinda stopped. It was one of those things were one lunatic is clearly getting his ass kicked but tries to keep fighting anyway, and everyone else finally decides “Forget it man, this fucker’s crazy” and just walks away.

Karla would wind up moving to St. Catherine for her job, so Paul made the two hour drive every weekend to visit her. But with her out of the way for most of the week, it left him plenty of opportunity to continue on with his crimes. He attacked a girl in late June, but she was able to fight back. She screamed to alert the neighbours, and Paul was left to run away with scratches all over his face from her resistance.

The next couple months were pretty eventful for Paul and Karla. Although she had been isolated from her family and high school friends, it was easy for her to make new friends. When Paul visited he got to spend time with them all and get to know these new friends. At first, they were all jealous of Karla. She had this rich, handsome, charming older boyfriend who took such good care of her and would always go up to the bar to get everyone’s drinks and pay for them whenever they all went out together.

However, one of the times he did this, the girls noticed that there was some sort of film or white specs on the top of their drinks. At first they joked that he was trying to ruffie them, but when the same thing kept appearing on every drink that Paul brought them, Karla’s friends had the sense not to drink anything he gave them.

That August, the couple also took an impromptu vacation to Disney World, though Karla lied to her parents and said that they were going to visit Paul’s grandparents. And I have absolutely no idea why she did that. Her family was already very permissive when she was in high school, and now she was working a real job and living a good drive away.

Maybe she thought that Tammy would hear the words “Disney World” and excitedly ask if she could come too, and she was afraid that Paul would say yes, but I don’t think there’s a definitive answer as to why she lied. Or as to how she was able to get an entire week off from the job she had only been at for a couple months so far for that matter, but maybe that only sounds unreasonable because I’m American.

Anyway, Paul and Karla spent ten days living it up at Disney World and documenting everything. Paul had upgraded his Polaroid camera to a video camera, and the couple loved recording absolutely everything. Nearly none of these tapes are available anymore, but it sounds like Paul never went anywhere without it. He also spent a lot of time that vacation recording himself and Karla in bed together wearing mouse ears.

But as soon as they returned to Canada and Karla was back at her job, Paul had to strike again. He followed a 22 year old woman home from the bus station, but this time he decided to follow her into her apartment. He proceeded to abuse her for two hours. In November he would attack a 15 year old girl, again after following her from a bus station.

Considering that Paul had nearly been caught shortly after the creation of the task force over 18 months earlier, it’s a bit weird that the police stopped staking out bus stations. It’s not like Paul was a master criminal who changed up his M.O., and he had only committed one crime outside of the immediate vicinity of his house. Maybe he was just getting lucky and happened to hit where the cops weren’t, but with how much the authorities already knew it’s heartbreaking that he couldn’t have been stopped sooner.

December of 1989 was going to be one of the biggest turning points of Paul and Karla’s lives. First, Karla quit her job at the veterinary clinic. She hated it there, and her boss was accusing her of stealing ketamine from the clinic. She wound up getting a job at another clinic, this time as a full vet technician rather than just an assistant. This meant more money, more responsibility, and full access to the clinic’s drugs.

Paul also quit his job. Even though working at the accounting firm paid well, he hated his white collar existence. He had never really wanted to work in an office, he wanted to be a big money hustla. Instead of making good money doing honest work, he was going to commit to smuggling cigarettes over the border as his full time job.

During the first week of December, the two took a romantic trip to Niagara Falls before Karla had to start up her new job. They had a wonderful time, and on December 9, as the couple was taking a romantic walk through a miniature Christmas village, Paul pulled out a unicorn music box. Hung around the unicorn’s horn was the diamond engagement ring that Karla had been waiting for. They wasted no time in beginning to plan their wedding, and they even purchased Karla’s wedding gown in Niagara Falls before returning home.

Of course, weddings are expensive so Paul was going to have to at least briefly take another accounting job to save up money for the wedding and honeymoon, but that was future Paul’s problem so he could deal with it in January. For now, they were going to enjoy their engagement and their Christmas together. There was only one more thing Paul had to do before Christmas. It was time for the penultimate victim that would be attributed to the Scarborough Rapist.

On December 22, Paul assaulted a 19 year old woman in the stairwell of an underground parking garage. His victim would remember the attack vividly and was able to describe the attacker in detail, but police also thought she was confused. There were things she described that didn’t make any sense, so the police chalked it up to her being paranoid from the trauma and, much to their detriment, disregarded most of her claim.

A couple days later, it was time to spend Christmas with Karla’s family again and share the news of their engagement. Everybody was thrilled, because the two seemed so happy together; they were a pair of Ken and Barbie dolls come to life. Paul was everything that Karla had ever dreamed of, and Karla was almost everything that Paul had ever dreamed of. The two felt like an almost perfect match, except for the one glaring problem that Paul just couldn’t get over: Karla wasn’t a virgin when they met.

She had given her virginity to someone else, and Paul felt like he owed her. He was a raving psychopath, but in his own mind he at least seemed to believe that he loved Karla and wanted to be with her. We’ll get to this part more later, but to be clear the first part of that was not opinion or hyperbole, Paul was a clinical psychopath.

So in the warped reality of his psychopathy Paul believed he was in love with Karla, but he needed her to make right with him what was owed. There was no way for Karla to change the past and get her virginity back, so she was going to have to give him the closest thing she could. Karla was going to have to give Paul Tammy’s virginity.

In January of 1990, Paul began a job at another accounting firm in Toronto. As much as he would have preferred to just keep smuggling cigarettes, he needed the reliable, high paying job to fund his future wedding. That was the plan anyway, but within two months he got bored and just stopped showing up to work. Instead, he tried to supplement his smuggling income by starting a worm picking business, because Canadians really love their fishing.

This plan absolutely did not work, and Paul quickly found himself $25,000 in debt.

He decided the best solution was to declare bankruptcy to eliminate his debt, go on unemployment, and just make his money illegally for the time being. He had also become obsessed again with all those motivational speakers he listened to while working for Amway. Paul believed that he could do the same thing they did, he just needed to find a way to put his own spin on things. But this was never going to work either.

Sure he had looks and charm, but as a motivational speaker his life story would have been a lot more like Matt Foley than Tony Robbins at this point.

In May of that year, Paul committed his 11th rape and the final one that would be attributed to the Scarborough Rapist. The victim was a 19 year old woman he found at a bus stop, and she vividly remembered everything about him. Her details were too clear to disregard like the previous victim, so police quickly got to work making a new composite sketch of the attacker and creating a full colour computer rendering of it.

The victim described her attacker as six feet tall, 180 pounds, medium muscular build, tanned skin, blue eyes, blonde hair, slightly crooked nose, small mole under the nose, no visible tattoos or scars, well groomed, good teeth, smelled good, wore a gold ring with three diamonds on his right hand, a class ring with a red stone on his left hand, and just on and on. It was an extremely detailed description that resulted in an image that looked almost exactly like Paul. The resemblance was undeniable, and anyone that had ever met him would have immediately recognized him.

And unlike back in 1987, this time the police decided to release their sketch to the public. It had been over three years since Paul’s random assaults began, and the police were only now realizing that people should be aware what the attacker might look like.

While that had all been going on, Paul also started to become increasingly obsessed with the idea of Tammy. Karla thought it was just a fantasy, so she decided to humour him a little bit to keep him happy. When Tammy wasn’t home, the two would have sex in her bed with Paul pretending that Karla was Tammy. The blinds in her bedroom also mysteriously broke, allowing Paul to peer in through the window at night and video tape her getting changed.

Paul was also spending a lot more time at the Homolkas’ family home, because not having or wanting a job tends to give you a lot of free time to relax by the pool and get drunk. One day, Paul was sitting by the pool when he realized he drank the last beer. He offered to go across the border to pick some up, and because of her crush Tammy jumped up and asked if she could go with him. Paul naturally agreed, and the two drove away together for hours.

They didn’t return until after midnight, by which point Karla was panicked. She obviously knew about Paul’s desires, but she had thought it was just a harmless, passing fantasy, not something he would act on. When it took so long for Paul and Tammy to return, she become terrified that she was going to lose control of the situation and lose the man that she felt she was supposed to marry. If Karla was going to keep Paul happy so that he wouldn’t leave her, she felt that she had no choice but to give him the thing that he wanted most.

She was going to have to give him Tammy.

Because of her job at the veterinary clinic, Karla had access to certain drugs that were effective on humans as well as animals. She was smart enough not to just steal medication from the clinic, as that would get her caught instantly. However, she also had the authority to call in orders to the pharmacy that she could pick up without the clinic ever knowing. I mean, if someone was paying close enough attention or doing an audit then they might have figured it out, but nothing was being stolen from inside the clinic so there was no reason for anyone to suspect a thing.

When the family went on a vacation together that July, Karla brought some Valium with her that she had taken from work. Paul and Karla spiked Tammy’s spaghetti dinner, and once she fell asleep Paul raped her for about a minute until she started to wake up. He was ecstatic that he had gotten Karla to give him what he wanted, but he needed more. His assaults normally lasted for an hour or longer, so if Karla really wanted to make him happy she had to figure out a way to keep Tammy unconscious longer.

He wanted to be able to take his time without Tammy remembering any of what happened.

But there was just one problem waiting for Paul back home. The police had released the composite sketch along with a $150,000 reward for any information leading to the Scarborough Rapist’s arrest. I mentioned that anyone who saw the sketch would immediately recognize it as Paul, and they did. Tips started coming in from Paul’s former coworkers at Price Waterhouse, from ex-girlfriends, from a teller at his bank who saw him once in a while, and from Tina Smirnis, the wife of one of the Smirnis boys, Alex.

While I haven’t found any evidence that Alex got up to anything as indecent as Paul and Van had together, he still knew a lot of their stories and by extension Tina did as well. They called in to the police, and were asked to come by for an interview in September. At the same time, the police finally found that victim’s statement that had been lost under paperwork three years earlier. It had the same description of Paul, matched the car he drove at the time, and the attack was barely two blocks from his house.

It seemed like they had everything they needed to bring Paul in for an interrogation, which they did, but it still took them two more months to come knocking. On November 19, police showed up at the Bernardo residence while Paul wasn’t home. They left their card with Kenneth and told him to have Paul give them a call.

You might think that Paul would have ignored this invitation, but he strolled into the police station the next day to be interviewed. While he admitted that the sketch did look a lot like him, he seemed otherwise unconcerned with what evidence the police had against him because he had the best defense there was.

Paul essentially explained to the cops, “Come on guys, look at me. I’ve had tons of girlfriends, I have a beautiful fiancé, and I’m hot as Hell. Why would I ever need to rape someone?” The police looked him over and they couldn’t help but agree that, just like Right Said Fred, Paul was too sexy for this interview.

But just to be sure, they asked if they could take some DNA samples anyway. They couldn’t compel him to without a warrant, but Paul voluntarily gave them hair, blood, and saliva samples to clear his name. I don’t think he properly thought that through since the DNA was going to do the exact opposite of clear his name, but he was fucking insane so whatever.

Unfortunately, this technology was still very new and there weren’t a lot of people able to actually test the DNA. Their best option was to send the samples to a lab in the United States for testing, and best case scenario this would take around 70-90 days. But this was anything but the best case scenario.

Not only were these labs typically backed up anyway, but the police had already shipped DNA samples from over 130 suspects, samples that would simply be tested in chronological order. And those 130 samples would also frequently get pushed to the back of the line, as DNA testing that the labs had to do for murder cases was considered a higher priority than DNA from rape cases.

It would be over two years before Paul’s DNA samples were finally tested, and that was entirely too late. Christmas was right around the corner, and Paul wanted his Christmas present from Karla.

The Schoolgirl Killer

The Valium hadn’t been enough, so Karla had to find something stronger. After researching all of the drugs she had at her disposal, she finally settled on Halcion. Halcion is a benzo similar to Xanax, but stronger. It’s generally prescribed as a very short term solution for severe insomnia, and she knew it would do the trick. Karla’s mother had taken Halcion before, and it completely knocked her out.

But she didn’t want to take any chances, either. This had to work, so Karla also acquired a bottle of liquid Halothane to make sure Tammy wouldn’t wake up while Paul was abusing her. Halothane is a strong general anesthetic that is usually administered through a gas mask in a very low concentration; usually only 1 or 2 parts Halothane per 100 parts oxygen.

Of course, Karla didn’t have the equipment at her house to properly administer a drug like this. She figured that if she soaked a rag in Halothane and held it kind of close to Tammy’s face, that would get the right mix of oxygen to ensure Tammy wouldn’t feel or remember anything.

On December 23, 1990, Paul and Karla were ready to put their plan into action. The Homolkas allowed Tammy to drink a little bit around the holidays. Not a ton, but it was okay for her to have one or two eggnogs with a little rum in them, which isn’t terribly unusual. After dinner Paul fixed a drink for Tammy, adding in the crushed up Halcion. Paul loved recording everything with his camera, and he was certainly going to film Tammy sipping on the drink that was going to finally give him what he wanted.

Suddenly out of nowhere, Tammy yelled, “These guys are trying to poison me” and ran off to her bedroom. At first the couple thought they were caught, but nobody had seemed to hear her. Eventually she came back downstairs to watch a movie with Paul, Karla, and the middle sister Lori, and Paul began making her more drinks. Lori told Paul to stop making drinks, but then she went up to bed leaving Tammy alone with Paul and Karla.

The couple waited, ignoring the movie completely as they intently watched for Tammy to fall asleep. As soon as she did she was placed on the floor, then Karla went to get the Halothane while Paul set up his video camera.

Karla soaked a rag and placed it directly over Tammy’s mouth and nose while Paul raped her. Karla kept checking Tammy’s pulse and breathing, and at one point added more Halothane to the rag to ensure Tammy wouldn’t wake up before Paul had finished. After some amount of time, Tammy began to vomit. They quickly rolled her onto her side so she wouldn’t choke and cleared her airway, but she had stopped breathing.

They put her clothes back on her and carried her to Karla’s bedroom in the basement. Paul tried to perform CPR while Karla called 911, but Tammy was unresponsive.

The sound of the ambulance sirens woke up the rest of the family, so Paul rushed to calm them down while Karla watched her sister being wheeled out to the ambulance with a breathing tube down her throat. A police officer stayed to question Paul, Karla, and Lori, while the parents went to the hospital. The officer felt that there was more to this than just a girl drinking too much, especially because of the large chemical burn on the side of Tammy’s face.

Karla had kept such a high concentration of Halothane on her face that it cause the burns, but she and Paul claimed it was a rug burn from when they dragged her from the couch across the carpet to perform CPR. While the officer was interrogating the three, a call came in from the other officers at the hospital: Tammy was declared dead on arrival.

Upon hearing the news, Lori immediately ran upstairs crying and the police officer went after her to console her. When she came back downstairs, Lori and Karla hugged each other and cried while Paul sat on the other couch, rocking back and forth while he slapped himself in the face screaming.

Despite their apparent grief, the three still all had to go to the police station to be questioned. After hours of waiting, they were each interrogated separately. The officer who was questioning them immediately noticed that the versions of events told by Paul and Karla were entirely too similar. They told the exact same story, even using much of the same language and word choices. It’s the sort of thing you only hear when people have hastily colluded to get their story straight for the cops.

It was a major red flag, as was the chemical burn. The coroner didn’t believe for a second that it was a rug burn, but the police hadn’t found the Halothane at the scene so he didn’t know what it actually was. Without any other evidence to go on, the coroner ruled Tammy’s death accidental. And despite their suspiciously similar stories, Paul and Karla wouldn’t be questioned in her death again.

Tammy’s funeral was just a couple days after Christmas. At one point, Paul was seen stroking Tammy’s hair in the open casket. Karla was repeatedly seen fixing Tammy’s hair and clothing. Without knowledge of what truly happened, people could easily see these as very odd and somewhat questionable coping mechanisms.

So while it was odd enough for people to have noticed and remembered, it is unlikely anybody tried to do anything about it. But there was something else they did that to me is way creepier. Before the coffin was interred, Paul and Karla slipped an invitation to their wedding written out to Tammy into her coffin.

Shortly after the funeral, Karla’s parents went away for a bit. I wouldn’t call it a vacation, they just needed to not be in that house for a while. Likewise, Lori went to stay with her grandparents leaving Paul and Karla alone in the house. Showing absolutely no remorse for what had happened, Paul decided it was time to take another victim.

But this wasn’t his usual M.O. Instead of following the victim to her house, he instead picked up a hitchhiker and brought her to Karla’s house where he filmed himself abusing her. Afterwards, he brought her back to his car and dropped her off on a deserted road.

This wasn’t the only plan Paul had with the empty house. He was still obsessed with Tammy, and he wanted to relive his fantasy. In a video known as the “fireside chat”, because Paul filmed absolutely everything, he had Karla put on Tammy’s clothes and pretend to be her while they had sex in her bed. There was a lot more on the tape than just that, but we’ll come back to it later.

When Karla’s parents returned, they wanted Paul out of the house. He was on worse terms with his parents than he had ever been, so he had essentially been living with the Homolkas. They had just lost their daughter, and whether they had any suspicions about Paul or not they wanted family time alone so they could grieve. They also wanted Karla to start scaling back the wedding that was planned for that June.

Paul and Karla decided that the best thing they could do would be to move in together in St. Catherine’s, closer to Karla’s work. They were about to get married so it made sense for them to rent a house together, and having their own place would also give them the freedom to do anything that they wanted.

They moved into their new place on February 1st, and it took them a couple months to settle in and get everything set up. I’m sure it could have been done much more quickly, but I suspect Paul wasn’t the type to help out with much of anything. But once they were settled in, Paul decided to continue his utterly worthless life the way he always had.

At around 5:30 in the morning on April 6, Paul was out in search of a new victim. He stumbled upon a 14 year old girl who was up early to train for the rowing team, and waited for an opportunity. The girl became briefly distracted when a car drove by and the driver waved at her, so Paul grabbed her and pulled her into the bushes. He assaulted her, then told her to wait there for five minutes while he disappeared.

It was another deviation from his usual M.O., not that it really mattered. The level of police incompetence we’ve already encountered is absolutely staggering, and this was no longer in Scarborough. Law enforcement agencies were especially notorious back then for not communicating with one another, so by moving cities he may as well have moved countries. There was no way anyone was going to connect this to his previous crimes.

June was about to be one of the busiest months for Paul and Karla, and not just because of their wedding. To start, Karla made a new friend by the name of Spike. Spike was a three foot long iguana that had been brought into her work to be put down. It had come from a home of abuse and neglect, so she decided to bring it home to nurse it back to health. She succeeded and decided to keep Spike as a pet.

One night, Van Smirnis and his girlfriend Joanne came over to visit. Everyone was just hanging out having a laugh, when suddenly Spike got a little anxious and bit Joanne’s finger. Paul was immediately enraged, saying that the iguana couldn’t just go around biting people. It needed to be disciplined, so he took Spike and Karla to the bedroom to teach him a lesson. I don’t really know what Paul’s plan to magically housebreak an iguana was, but it didn’t work and Spike just bit him as well. Good boy.

Paul grabbed Spike and took him to the kitchen where he threw the iguana onto the cutting board, chopped its head off, and yelled at Karla to clean up the mess. As always, she did as she was told, skinning and gutting her former pet. Paul then tossed it onto the grill and served it for what had to have been the most uncomfortable dinner of Van and Joanne’s life. Joanne understandably wouldn’t take a bite and Van just kind of picked at his, but Paul ate his entire plate with Karla eating most of hers.

On June 7th, Karla invited a friend of hers over to visit. That friend, known only as Jane Doe, was a 15 year old girl that Karla had met a couple years earlier while working at a pet store when Jane was only 12. Jane was given drinks laced with Halcion, and when she passed out she was filmed being raped by Paul. Karla had again used Halothane while the girl was unconscious, but this time it did not result in her death.

When Jane woke up she went home and was sick in bed for three days, but she thought it was just the flu.

Part of Paul couldn’t have been happier with how things went. Instead of killing their victim, this time she had only gotten a little sick and hadn’t suspected a thing. It wasn’t exactly the way he had envisioned his virgin farm, but if they could keep inviting girls over like this it would be a dream come true for him. But another part of him was furious with Karla. Why couldn’t she have gotten it right the first time with Tammy so that he’d still have her as well?

A week later, Paul went to go pick up his marriage certificate before the wedding, then drove across the border to make a cigarette run. He delivered the cigarettes to Van back in Scarborough so Van could fence them. That whole route is at least four hours of driving so it was already going to be late by the time he got home, but he decided to take a little detour in Burlington to steal some license plates.

Unbeknownst to him, the city of Burlington had recently been struck by tragedy. A car accident had claimed the lives of multiple high schoolers, and the wake was that night. Following the wake, some of their classmates had gone to the woods to drink and remember their friends, and they were only just getting home now at around 2 am. Among them was 14 year old Leslie Mahaffy.

Leslie had been going through a bit of a rebellious phase, as teenagers are wont to do. She would frequently disappear from her house or stay out past her curfew, and her parents had gotten sick of it. They told that if she stayed out past curfew that they would lock the door, and when the group arrived at Leslie’s house she discovered that the door to her house was in fact locked. She told her friends that it was fine and that the other door would be unlocked, so she sent them on their way.

Once her friends were gone, she discovered that the other door was also locked.

I don’t blame the parents and I hope they didn’t blame themselves, but I do have a lot of mixed feelings about that. On the one hand it’s important to enforce the boundaries you’re trying to set, but on the other their teenage daughter had just been to a wake for multiple of her friends. If there was ever going to be a time to cut the girl some slack, it was that night.

Leslie walked to a payphone at a nearby plaza to call her friend Amanda and ask if she could stay the night there, but Amanda said no. She thought it was a bad idea because her little sister was sick, and the last time Leslie had spent the night there Leslie’s mother gave Amanda’s mother Hell over it. Amanda kept telling her to just go home and ring the doorbell so her parents could let her in, but Leslie sounded worried and insisted that she didn’t want to go home.

While she was walking back to her house to figure out how she would get inside, she spotted Paul. He told her that he was planning to break into a nearby house, then asked her if she wanted a cigarette. She said yes, so Paul took her to his car where he said the cigarettes were. They got inside the car and he gave her the cigarette as promised.

Paul asked her what her name was and she told him it was Leslie. When she asked for his name in return, he pulled out a knife from under his seat and told her it didn’t matter what his name was. He then made her put one of his shirts over her head and drove her back to his house.

When Paul got home, he brought Leslie inside then went upstairs. He instructed Karla to stay in bed and to just be quiet for a while. He then went back downstairs, set up his camera, and began to rape Leslie. For the next 24-36 hours, Leslie would remain a prisoner in the house while being tortured and abused. The entire time, she had been blindfolded by Paul’s turtleneck. Even when she was allowed to take a shower, the turtleneck never left her head.

Despite being the victim of sadistic torment Leslie was able to remain mostly calm, likely because of her blindfold. She had no idea where she was or who was attacking her, and Paul had been very encouraging. He told her what a good job she was doing, and at one point stated, “The next two hours are going to determine what I do to you. Right now, you’re scoring perfect.”

As horrible as everything was, she almost certainly believed she would survive the ordeal as long as she stayed blindfolded and didn’t fight back.

That’s why, as soon as Leslie thought her blindfold might be slipping, she made sure to tell Paul. It was the smartest thing to do under the circumstances, but you can’t reason with a psychopath. The next day, Leslie’s dead body was carried down to the basement so Paul and Karla could prepare their house for Father’s Day dinner with the Homolkas. The most heartbreaking part of Leslie’s story, besides all of it, is the tapes. According to everyone who saw the tapes, Leslie’s blindfold never budged.

Karla’s parents would spend about eight hours in their home that day with no idea what had just happened. The closest they came to discovering anything was when Karla’s mother asked if she should go to the basement to get the potatoes. Karla cheerfully stopped her and said she’d do it. She retrieved a bag of potatoes that was on the floor next to Leslie’s body, though seeing the body disgusted her and ruined her dinner.

When the Homolkas left after dinner, Paul went to the store to buy bags and bags of cement. Leslie’s body was dismembered and encased in eight different cement blocks. The next day, they drove to nearby Lake Gibson to dump the cement blocks into the lake. Seven were deposited into the lake, but at about 200 pounds, one of the blocks was too heavy for them to move so they just left it on the shore.

Just under two weeks later, on June 29, Paul and Karla were married in front of all of their family and friends. The celebration had not been downsized as Karla’s parents wanted, and it was a lavish event with about 150 guests. Everyone was enjoying the reception and the newlyweds danced together without a care in the world. But coincidentally, there was something else going on 15 miles away at Lake Gibson.

While the reception was taking place, a couple families had gone to the lake. One was a married couple who were enjoying an evening on the water in their canoe, and the other was a father and son pair who were fishing on the shore. As the canoe passed by the father and son, the husband began yelling something at them about a strange purple fish.

The father was pretty annoyed by this since you’re supposed to be quiet when you fish, but the couple kept shouting at them. They said that when they were getting their canoe in the water they tripped over a cement block that had broken open and it had some weird looking purple fish they had never seen before that kind of looked like human body parts. This change in wording suddenly got the father’s attention, and he went over to the spot that the couple were indicating.

As Paul and Karla packed to fly away to Hawaii for their honeymoon, police were pulling the remaining blocks of cement from the water. When they were taken to the coroner, he had to use a hammer and chisel to free the body from the cement. It was so badly damaged that there was no way to determine the actual cause of death, and Leslie was only able to be identified by her braces.

When Paul and Karla returned from Hawaii, they were picked up at the airport by the Homolkas. On the car ride, the Homolkas told them about the body that had been found in Lake Gibson. It had been major news, because St. Catherine was supposed to be such a safe area. Unfortunately, its reputation as a safe place combined with Paul and Karla’s stupidity would actually wind up buying them more time.

The police were working on the assumption that the killer couldn’t have been from the area. The cement blocks had been discarded in water that was only three feet deep, and one of them didn’t even make it into the water. Surely anyone who was from the area would have known that if they just went up the river 300 feet, there was a bridge where the blocks could have been dumped into water so deep that nobody would ever find them.

Tammy and Leslie were gone, but the couple remembered that they still had Jane Doe. The only problem they had to deal with was Jane’s mother. She had become really suspicious when Jane went to spend the night with Karla and came home so sick. She also had the very obvious question of why the Hell does a couple in their 20s want to be friends with a 15 year old girl?

To alleviate her concerns, Paul and Karla invited Jane and her mother over for dinner. They thought it would help if they could show that they were nice, ordinary people who just really wanted to be friends with this underage girl.

It did not help. Paul spent the entire dinner complaining about his parents, and Jane’s mother felt worse about the whole thing than before she had gone there. But she also wanted to take a realistic approach to things. Jane was about to turn 16, and it was going to be harder and harder to control her. If she pushed back too hard on this, Jane might wind up doing something even more reckless. Besides, Jane really seemed to like Karla and she wasn’t the one that made an ass of themselves at dinner.

The three of them wound up hanging out together pretty frequently over the remainder of the year. On August 10, Jane came over and was drugged again. While Paul was assaulting her, Jane suddenly stoppedbreathing so Karla called 911.

Two minutes later, she started breathing again so they called 911 back and said never mind, everything’s totally cool now. I am genuinely shocked that doing that actually worked. In America if you call 911 for an emergency then try to say never mind, I’m pretty sure they just tell the first responders to drive faster.

But this was too close a call for Paul and Karla. If Jane died they were going to need to find a new victim. Instead of drugging and raping Jane, it was decided to just groom her instead.

The couple took Jane to restaurants and to the theater, as well as spending time together at their house. One of the things Jane enjoyed doing when she wasn’t with them was taking horse riding lessons. During one of these lessons she mentioned to her instructor that Paul liked to touch her, and the instructor in turn told Jane’s mother.

Jane’s mother confronted Paul about this, but she didn’t stop Jane from spending time with them. But the dynamic they had created with Jane wasn’t working as intended. Coercing and manipulating her worked to a point and she would allow certain things to happen without resisting, but she wouldn’t have sex with Paul.

She didn’t really want to do anything with Paul, she just wanted to be friends with Karla. Karla was the nice girl from the pet store that had always let her come in and play with the puppies when she was 12. Paul was her creepy husband that would molest her, often in plain view of Karla.

Shortly before Christmas, Jane decided she had put up with enough. When she was over at Paul and Karla’s house, she made it clear that she was not going to have sex with Paul. Jane was left alone while Paul and Karla slept upstairs, so she called her mother to pick her up and never came back.

Paul was not thrilled with this result, but Karla almost certainly was. She loved Paul and was ready to have children with him. She had spent years doing everything he asked so that she could make him happy, but she could still feel him pulling away over these other girls.

She began writing him letters to try to win him back. In one such letter she wrote: “I want our love back. People think we’re the perfect couple.

We are. We’ve just gotten sidetracked. Even though we have our problems.

I am still so much in love with you…I know what happened to us is all my fault and believe me I am changing. I love you too much to lose you.” But Paul was happier being sidetracked.

He wanted more, and having one girl at a time wasn’t going to satisfy his desires. His newest demand was for Karla to help him acquire 50 virgin sex slaves. On April 16 the following year, the two went out hunting for a victim for Paul.

Since they were explicitly looking for virgins, they decided that a Catholic high school was the best place to go. They passed the Holy Cross school and pulled over by the entrance of the nearby Grace Lutheran Church, looking for someone to abduct. It was broad daylight and there would be witnesses, but it didn’t matter.

Paul had been assaulting girls and making money illegally for years, so he thought that nothing would ever stop him. When the school let out, Karla waved down Kristen French. Kristen was a 15 year old Girl Scout, figure skater, and member of the school’s rowing team.

She was an honour student who volunteered at a nursing home. When school had ended for the day, all she wanted to do was get home to feed her dog then get ready to go to the Easter dance with her boyfriend. Karla was holding a map and asked Kristen for directions.

While she was distracted, Paul forced Kristen into the car at knifepoint before driving away. There were witnesses to the abduction, though they might not have known who Kristen was. But Kristen’s disappearance was immediately noticed by her family and friends.

She had a very strict routine of always making the 15 minute walk home from school immediately so she could feed and walk her dog. She was never late, so it took very little time for them to realize something was wrong and for the police to know who they were searching for. Unfortunately, the witnesses dropped the ball.

One of the witnesses was absolutely certain that the car Kristen had been abducted by was a cream coloured Chevy Camaro, but Paul drove a gold Nissan. With the police searching for the wrong car, there was nothing to stop Paul and Karla. When they got back to the house, the blinds had to be closed and all the phones disconnected before a blindfolded Kristen was led from the garage into the house.

Paul took her upstairs to film himself abusing her while Karla made dinner. He kept feeding Kristen alcohol, and when she threw up Karla came in to clean it up before finishing dinner. At dinner, they removed Kristen’s blindfold.

They ate a normal meal as if nothing had just happened, with Karla talking to Kristen about her boyfriend Elton and her dog Sasha. After dinner, Paul took her back upstairs to torture her more while Karla cleaned the kitchen. When it was time to get some sleep, Paul wanted to give Kristen Halcion to ensure she would sleep through the night, but Karla refused to because Halcion would show up in an autopsy.

The next day, Paul drew a bath for Kristen so he could record her while she bathed herself, then Karla and Kristen did each other’s makeup while they talked about the different perfumes and cosmetic brands that they liked. After more abuse throughout the day, Paul tied Kristen to a chair. He was going to get them all some McDonalds for dinner, and he wanted to know what movie Kristen wanted him to rent from Blockbuster for them to watch that night.

While Paul was gone, Karla turned on the evening news which featured Kristen’s father begging for her safe return, causing her to burst into tears. Paul returned with their dinner, then got back to torturing Kristen. Obviously, Kristen hadn’t wanted to talk with Karla about boys and perfume while doing their makeup.

She hadn’t wanted to drink alcohol. She hadn’t wanted any of this, and she was trying to play along in the hopes that it meant she survive. But she finally started to talk back to Paul.

Kristen was doing everything she could to make him happy so she could survive, but she was inexperienced and didn’t know how to do the things he wanted. He started yelling at her for messing up, so she started yelling back, calling him a bastard. When he demanded that Kristen tell Karla that she loved her, Kristen replied, “Karla?

Is that your name?” The violence against her only increased after that. But the more violent Paul became, the more defiant Kristen became with her refusing Paul’s orders by saying “Some things are worth dying for.”

Kristen’s last words to be caught on tape were spoken directly to Paul. “I don’t know how your wife can stand being around you.” The next day was Easter, and by the time Paul and Karla left to go spend the day with the Homolkas, Kristen was already dead.

Paul had considered just leaving her tied up at the house until they returned, but it was too much of a liability. Kristen’s body was found naked in a ditch on April 30th. The side road where Kristen had been dumped was within throwing distance of Leslie’s grave, but police thought the location was a coincidence.

One had been dismembered and put in a lake while the other was thrown on the side of the road. They were different enough that almost none of the police thought the crimes were connected, though the media would eventually dub the unknown suspect the Schoolgirl Killer. But finally, and in spite of this gross oversight on the part of the police, things were going to come crashing down around Paul and Karla.

Trouble in Paradise Kristen’s body had been found on April 30th, and the police immediately released a profile of the killer. Now, Van Smirnis was Paul’s best and oldest friend. They had known each other since childhood, so Van knew him really well.

As soon as he saw the profile of the killer, he was convinced it was Paul. The two may have done a lot of illegal things together, including sharing a fondness for underage girls, but murder was a bridge too far. Van was already talking to the police on May 1st to make sure they investigated Paul.

And about a week and a half later, police finally came knocking on Paul’s door to ask him where he had been when the two girls were kidnapped. He used Karla as an alibi, and was able to charm his way past the officers. He was just such a nice, good looking, and well spoken man, so it was hard for them to think this could have been the killer.

Paul again voluntarily offered DNA samples, after all it’s not like anything came of it the first time he did The officers asked if he owned a Camaro, and he was happy to point out his Nissan. Just to be safe, as they were leaving they discretely looked at his car from a further distance to see if it could be mistaken for a Camaro. They concluded that no, no it couldn’t.

When Paul went to Karla to gloat about how he had fooled some stupid cops yet again, she pointed out that maybe they were just playing him. Maybe they didn’t believe a Goddamn word he said and just wanted to lull him into a false sense of security so that when they came back with a search warrant he wouldn’t have thought to hide any evidence. Evidence like the countless hours of videotape of girls being raped that were just sitting in their house for anyone to find.

They took the tapes and hid them in the insulation in the basement ceiling where nobody would ever find them. They also decided to legally change their name from the Bernardos to the Teales. Teale was chosen because it was the name of the serial killer in Karla’s favourite movie, Criminal Law, although the name was spelled very differently there.

Paul also changed his middle name from Kenneth to Jason, in honour of the serial killer from every Friday the 13th movie except for the good one. The exact reason they changed their names is unknown, but there are three reasons that have been suggested so it could be any or all of them. First, it may have just been done in an abundance of caution.

If Paul Bernardo was going to be wanted for a bunch of crimes, it may be better if Paul Bernardo no longer existed. It’s not like it would be impossible to find the records of what they changed their names to, but it would still be an inconvenient waste of time that would slow everything down. Next, Paul may have been trying to distance himself from his father.

Not just because Kenneth wasn’t his biological father and they didn’t really like each other, though that surely would have been a big part of it, but because Kenneth was a convicted sex criminal. He didn’t really get punished for it, but it was still on his record and the further from that Paul could get the better. The final proposed reason for the name change is that Paul and Karla may have been a bit racist.

They were supposed to be this ideal, beautiful couple with their blonde hair and blue eyes. Did they really want a last name that sounded so swarthy and ethnic? Around this time, Paul and Karla began inviting another girl over to their house, Norma.

Norma had been Tammy’s best friend, and she liked hanging out with Paul and Karla. They were these cool adults that bought her presents and let her have alcohol and stuff, and she thought it was fun hanging out and doing stuff together. Karla had wanted to drug her so Paul could take what he wanted and they could move on with their lives, but Paul refused.

Tammy and Jane had both stopped breathing when they were given Halcion and Halothane, so he forbade the use of either. He wanted to attempt to groom her instead like they had attempted with Jane. December of 1992 was going to be one of the other biggest turning points of Paul and Karla’s lives; it always seemed to be December for these two.

Despite Paul’s efforts, thus far Norma was only willing to kiss him and only as long as Karla was there and didn’t mind, but she refused to go any further than that. On December 13, the couple took Norma for a night out. They took her to see a show and then all went to a hotel together.

Norma was filmed doing cartwheels around the room and kissing Paul a little bit, and after Karla passed out from drinking too much he tried to get her to do more with him. Norma still wasn’t willing to do anything else physical, but Paul did have one idea she was open to. The two grabbed a lighter and a can of hairspray, ran out into the hall, and lit a serving cart on fire before quickly running back to their room.

After the alarms sounded and the hotel was evacuated, Paul gleefully recorded from the parking lot as the fire trucks pulled up to sort out the mess he had created. Just before Christmas, Norma came over again and was showered with a mountain of lavish Christmas presents. Paul was trying to do everything in his power to keep her with them without resorting to drugs.

Then on Christmas Eve and Christmas, Paul and Karla went to the Homolkas’ house. It was mostly uneventful, except for Christmas Eve when they were trying to sleep. Karla had moved out so she didn’t have a bedroom anymore, and allegedly nobody wanted to sleep in Tammy’s bedroom.

I’m sure that wasn’t actually true, but Paul wasn’t going to admit it in front of the rest of the family. Instead, Paul and Karla spent the night with her sister Lori in her bedroom. Karla quickly fell asleep while Paul and Lori stayed up talking a bit.

At one point, Paul told her that if she ever needed anybody killed to just say the word and he’d take care of it. She chalked it up to him just having too much to drink, but she was also absolutely terrified. The day after Christmas, Paul and Karla invited Norma over again, but this time she brought somebody with her: her boyfriend.

Paul was not happy about this and demanded that Norma tell him she loved him in front of her boyfriend, which she very much did not do. She said that she didn’t love him because he was too old for her and she already had a boyfriend. A boyfriend with whom she left, never to return to Paul and Karla’s house again.

This resulted in a lot of fighting between Paul and Karla. Paul thought he was going to have a new toy, and he blamed Karla for ruining it. When Karla tried to say that she could have just put Norma out for him with Halcion, he began repeatedly striking her in the face for even suggesting the thing he had explicitly forbade.

When New Year’s Eve rolled around, Paul left to go celebrate with some friends in Montreal to clear his head. But while all of that was going on with Paul and Karla, two other things had happened that month that neither of them were aware of. Over in Scarborough, Paul’s sister Debbie went to the police.

She suspected that her father was doing the same thing to her four year old daughter that he had done to her, and she was absolutely not going to allow that to happen. She told the police everything that had happened to her growing up, and Kenneth Bernardo was arrested. Then in Toronto, the Centre of Forensic Science finally began testing the DNA samples that Paul had provided the police back in 1990.

The Arrest and the Search for Evidence Paul had gone to Montreal to clear his head, but it did not help and he was more angry with Karla than he had ever been before. He believed it was her job to bring him virgin sex slaves, and anytime she tried they either died or Karla scared them away. He grabbed a flashlight and began beating Karla with it, severely injuring her and leaving her with two massive black eyes.

The attack was so bad that when Karla went to work, she thought it would be believable to say she had been in a car accident. Her coworkers didn’t buy it, and Karla’s mother paid a surprise visit to her work on January 5th after receiving two anonymous phone calls telling her to go look at her daughter’s face. Karla admitted to her mother that Paul beat her, and agreed to go back to her parents’ house to be safe.

She was supposed to go home, pack, and then Karla’s mother would pick her up at an agreed upon place and time. But Karla didn’t show up. Her mother tried calling the house and then the police, but she couldn’t get ahold of anyone.

At around 9:30 pm, she tried calling the house again and Paul answered the phone. He put Karla on the line, and Karla told her mother that she was fine and to just go home and let it go. Her mother went home, but she absolutely did not let it go.

Her parents both came back the next day and happened to arrive when Karla was home alone, looking even worse than the night before. After the little incident with Karla’s mother the previous night, Paul had taken her with him on a cigarette run and reportedly beat her on the entire drive there and back. Karla’s parents took her to a friend’s house back home, and that friend was eventually able to convince her to go to the hospital.

The ER doctor that treated her said it was the worst case of spousal abuse he had ever seen, and Karla was eventually convinced to go to the police. Karla was ready to turn on Paul and tell the cops everything about him being the Scarborough Rapist. What she didn’t expect was for the police’s questions to start turning towards the topic of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.

They had already suspected that the murders had also been perpetrated by the Scarborough Rapist, and they grew more suspicious when they saw Karla wearing the same type of Mickey Mouse watch that Lesley had been wearing when she disappeared. Her lawyer tried to get her a deal of immunity in exchange for her testimony in the rape cases, but the prosecution was delaying as much as possible. Then, on February 1st, Paul’s DNA was finally matched to the Scarborough Rapist.

They had their man, and they could go arrest him in a couple weeks or so, whenever they got around to it. To be fair, this time the police actually had a good reason for something they did. The DNA evidence for Paul as the Scarborough Rapist was airtight, but the evidence connecting him to the murders was flimsy at best.

They needed something more concrete, and they were trying not to rely on Karla. She was portraying herself as being just as much of a victim as any of the other girls, the compliant victim of a sadistic, abusive partner who would beat her if she ever stepped out of line. But the prosecution wasn’t fully convinced.

They thought she had been more involved than she had let on so they wanted to avoid a deal until they were sure they had no other evidence. By leaving Paul free, it allowed them to place him under 24 hour surveillance and get a warrant to tap his phones. They wanted to catch him in the act to build a stronger case, but Paul wasn’t doing much of anything at this point.

He was just spending his days popping pills, getting drunk, and calling Karla to beg her to come home. On occasion he’d even throw in some threats of suicide if she refused to come back. But despite being entirely self involved, he did find time to write a statement for his father’s trial.

Despite not liking Kenneth, Paul actually wrote a letter on his behalf. Kenneth was convicted, so I’m not clear whether this was a character statement sent for the trial or if it was the sentencing period when others are allowed to speak for either side in an attempt to influence the final sentencing. Either way, it was a terrible statement.

Paul essentially wrote that whatever happened had happened years ago, and there was no reason for Debbie to still be so upset about it. That probably would have been pretty damaging if they weren’t already 100% sure he was the Scarborough Rapist at this point. On February 17th, Paul was finally arrested and brought in to be interrogated.

They had gotten a lot of information from Karla at this point, and she even directed the police to Jane and Norma so they could give their stories. However, whoever interrogated those girls really dropped the ball from a tactical standpoint. The detectives essentially let the girls know that Karla was cooperating with the police and that they believed she was just a victim as well, and knowing that could have a pretty strong effect on how Jane and Norma were going to describe the events.

Some within the police were still suspicious of Karla, though it was now unlikely they were going to get any evidence against her from these girls. But what they did get was all the Christmas presents that Paul had given to Norma. When Paul walked into the interrogation room, it was staged to look like some big task force affair designed to take him down.

There were all sorts whiteboards and stuff with details about the case and officer assignments and whatnot, and spread out on the table that Paul sat down on were all the presents that Paul had given to Norma. Paul was not impressed, and he just sat down and yawned. This was probably another tactical blunder.

The whole staged room setup seems a bit over the top, and the presents from Norma were overplaying their hand a bit. They were obviously trying to scare him into thinking they knew more than they did, but it also gave away the fact that Karla had turned on him. How else would they have known that Norma even existed?

After hours of getting absolutely nowhere, other than an enthralling conversation about Paul’s burgeoning rap career, the interrogators flat out told him that Karla had turned on him and was the best rat they ever had. Except they didn’t say her name. They had already been pressing Paul to implicate a second person in the murders, so they were trying to bait him into throwing Karla under the bus.

But it didn’t work. At 1:30 am, Paul was put into a holding cell following his completely futile interrogation. There was still one more hope for the police to find the evidence they needed, however.

Karla had told them about the tapes they made. If the cops could find those tapes, they wouldn’t need to make a deal for her testimony. Two days after Paul’s arrest, search warrants were issued for the house.

However, the warrants were only being issued in regards to the Scarborough Rapist case. The evidence linking Paul to the murders was too weak and didn’t justify a warrant. Only items listed on the search warrant were allowed to be removed, which is pretty standard for a warrant.

The warrant did include video tapes, but all tapes had to be viewed in the house first to make sure they were relevant before being removed. Most important, damage to the house had to be kept to a minimum; the police weren’t allowed to tear down walls looking for the tapes. The warrant was valid for 71 days, and on the third day of searching police thought they found pay dirt.

They came across a collection of tapes, but it turned out to mostly just be shows that had been recorded from the TV. There was one tape that showed Jane Doe being assaulted, but nothing that was going to link Paul to Leslie or Kristen. The police kept searching high and low for all 71 days, but the tape of Jane Doe was the only one that they found.

By that point Paul had hired a lawyer, Ken Murray, and was prepared to plead not guilty to the charges of kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, and first degree murder. On May 6th, one week after the search warrant expired, Paul asked his lawyer to do a little favour for him. Ken went to the house that the police had just spent over two months searching, and retrieved the tapes from the exact place that Paul told him they would be.

And nobody else would have any idea that those tapes were in Ken’s possession for the next 18 months. With no tapes and a lack of substantial evidence, the prosecution needed to secure Karla’s testimony if they were going to convict Paul for the murders of Leslie and Kristen. They offered her an extremely generous deal in which she would plead guilty to two counts of manslaughter and serve 12 years in prison in exchange for her testimony.

They also made the unusual move of putting a publication ban in place for both the trial and the plea deal. They claimed it was so that Paul could get a fair trial, but they really just didn’t want anyone to know what was happening. But publication bans in Ontario aren’t binding in the United States, and news began coming in from New York.

There was also a fledgling internet at this point with details being spread all over Usenet newsgroups. When the public found out what was happening, their first response was confusion over Karla’s sentence. If this is your first exposure to the case, you may also be confused why Karla still received 12 years as part of the deal if she was just another victim of Paul’s who was coerced and beaten into aiding him in his crimes.

Up until this point, I’ve tried to only let you know as much as the public would have known at the time, though you actually already know considerably more than they did. Karla was being portrayed as a victim and an unwilling accomplice partly because many of those involved in the case believed it to be true, and partly out of necessity. She was their main evidence against Paul, so she needed to be a credible witness.

Even though some of those involved, including her lawyer, felt that there was more to the story than she was revealing, they needed her testimony to be able to hold up in court to convict Paul. The only thing that could impeach Karla’s testimony was Ken Murray and the tapes. But Ken wasn’t an experienced criminal lawyer, nor was his co-counsel.

He was in way over his head, and with Paul trying to convince him to destroy the tapes it was all just too much. Ken met with a much more experienced criminal lawyer, John Rosen, to offer him the case. John was well known for his ability to either get clients off completely or get them dramatically reduced sentences, so it seemed like the perfect person to go to.

John was a bit hesitant about the offer. Sure, it was a high profile case that would only add to his notable reputation, but why did Ken really want to stop defending Paul? Ken had told John about the tapes in his possession, but not what was on them.

That obviously couldn’t happen until John was officially signed on as Paul’s lawyer. The only hint as to why Ken wanted out came in the form of a phone call from one of John’s friends. That friend was a fellow lawyer who had coincidentally been contacted by Ken to represent him.

When a lawyer wants to not only drop his client but needs to hire his own lawyer, that’s a bad sign. John’s friend obviously couldn’t go into details, but he said that Ken hired him over an ethics issue. You know, the ethics of withholding vital evidence from police for a full year and a half.

Against the advice of family, friends, and the partners at his law firm, John decided to take the case for one simple reason: he needed to know what it was Ken knew that had him in such a state. After meeting with Ken and Paul in jail, John was officially made his counsel and Ken handed the tapes over to him. Paul had wanted to destroy the tapes and Ken wanted to use them to impeach Karla’s testimony, but after seeing what was on those tapes the only thing John wanted to do was cry.

He immediately handed them over to the police, and as the truth came out public perception took a sudden and dramatic turn. People had once been asking how the victim of a rapist and murderer could be forced to spend 12 years in jail for testifying against a monster, but now that the tapes were out of Ken’s possession they instead wanted to know why Karla wasn’t going to die in prison where she belonged. The plea bargain became known as “the deal with the devil”, and it is one of if not the most controversial plea deals in Canadian legal history.

The Deal with the Devil Karla had a much more ordinary upbringing than Paul did, though that’s an awfully low bar to clear. Her father, Karel, was a traveling salesman and an alcoholic, and when drunk he would become verbally abusive, especially towards Karla’s mother, Dorothy. Whenever they got into arguments, the three daughters would comfort each other and often hide in the basement.

Karla was born with severe asthma and spent a lot of time in the hospital at an early age, though it is largely believed not to have affected her development. Even as a child, she was obsessive and controlling, spending an immense amount of time on her appearance from an early age. If friends came to play with their dolls or something, Karla had to control every aspect of what they were doing.

If her friends were “playing wrong”, then playtime was over and they could just leave. She was also an exceptionally bright student. Paul had done well in school, but Karla was definitely his intellectual superior.

She had a borderline genius IQ and loved to read and learn. Teachers loved her, and in fact everyone loved her. But she didn’t love them.

Karla was regarding as being extremely moody, with people never sure which version of her was going to show up each day. Her favourite pastime seemed to be upsetting people, as if their fear and sadness was sustenance for her. She became very into the occult as a way to scare people more, and it was said that she always knew exactly what to say to someone to destroy them emotionally.

In one rather colourful example, she told a classmate that she wanted to draw dots all over his body, play connect the dots with a knife, then pour vinegar all over his wounds. Karla also began dressing in all black, with lots of black nail polish and dark makeup, and she died her hair various punk colours. It was your typical goth/punk phase that lots of kids go through, so on its own it wouldn’t be overly concerning.

However, she also began cutting designs into her arms and filling the cuts with black nail polish. Then there was the hamster. Karla was supposedly an animal lover, but she wound up killing her friend’s pet hamster, theoretically by accident.

She created a parachute for the hamster using a pillowcase and threw it out the window. While a little unsettling, that’s not necessarily a red flag on its own. Kids get curious and experiment with things, and this wasn’t the craziest idea.

You could buy G.I. Joes with parachutes, so clearly this was the sort of thing that intrigued children. Of course, anyone who ever owned a toy paratrooper could also tell you that the parachutes were pretty shit and rarely worked.

It’s weird that Karla would have thrown the hamster out the window without testing the parachute on a Barbie doll or something first, but smart kids can act impulsively and without foresight as well. It’s only what happened after that makes this story particularly unsettling. Two weeks later, Karla came back to her friend’s house to dig up the hamster because she wanted to see what it looked like while it was decomposing.

There are all sorts of anecdotes from her early life we could talk about that toe the line between someone trying too hard to be edgy and possible signs of psychopathy, like when she signed someone’s high school yearbook by writing, “Death rules. Death kicks. I love death.

Kill the fucking world.” But there’s one event from her childhood that was almost certainly the most formative for her as it would relate to her relationship with Paul. Karel would occasionally stop by Dorothy’s work and knew many of her coworkers, though they largely thought of him as a creepy pervert.

When one of Dorothy’s coworkers got divorced, Karel showed up at her door and said that he loved her and wanted to leave his wife for her. The woman understandably said no, and that should have been that. Maybe it would have been, had Dorothy not gotten involved.

After finding out what happened, it was Dorothy who knocked on the coworker’s door next. She explained that Karel wasn’t going to leave her and didn’t love the woman, there was obviously just something he needed to get out of his system. In a shocking example of porn movie logic bleeding over into the real world, Dorothy invited her coworker to come have a threesome with them.

That way, Karel could get it out of their system and the marriage could get back to normal. So that’s exactly what the three of them did. Karla was aware this all happened, and it seems to have influenced her perception of how supposedly healthy relationships work.

By high school, Karla was already experimenting with drugs and sex. She was also one of the most popular and well liked girls in school, which is a bit of an aberration. It’s not very common for a goth kid to somehow become the top of the school’s social hierarchy, but that’s where Karla was.

She was even the leader of her very own clique of mean girls, the Exclusive Diamond Club. The goal of these girls was simple: find a rich older man to buy them a diamond engagement ring. And you can sure as Hell bet that Karla was bragging to her friends the moment she met Paul.

All the boys she had met before bored her. She had been controlling and domineering her whole life, and she always got what she wanted. Her boyfriends would never challenge her, and they certainly wouldn’t indulge her intense sexual fantasies.

Karla had owned that pair of police handcuffs for years before she met Paul, but no one before him would have even considered using them on her. She believed she had found her perfect match. Now this episode is already going to be long enough, so we aren’t going to run through every detail of what happened again with added perspective from Karla, but we are going to hit the highlights.

To start, Karla told the police that Paul didn’t tell her he was the Scarborough Rapist until their honeymoon, but that’s just not true. When Paul was first brought into the police station to be questioned and gave his DNA samples, Karla decided they needed to be cautious. Not with their behaviour, but they needed to prepare alibis for Paul for the dates of the attacks.

The couple went to the library to look up the dates of his attacks in the archived newspapers, and they began making a list of all the dates they would need to come up with alibis for. While they were doing that, Karla realized they needed to pick up some things from the store. So she wrote down a grocery list on the same piece of paper that had the dates of all the Scarborough Rapist attacks.

Not only was this evidence that Karla was well aware Paul was a rapist for most of their relationship, but one could argue her decision to write both lists on the same paper showed that she found them equally mundane. There was also that victim from the parking garage, the one whose testimony the police largely disregarded. The reason that the police didn’t think the victim’s statement made any sense is because she thought she saw another person there.

In the shadows behind her attacker, the victim swore she saw a blonde woman holding a video camera. The 14 year old girl who was up early to practice rowing had also been distracted by a blonde woman driving by and waving at her. Karla’s friends were right as well when they suspected that Paul was putting something in their drinks.

Karla had already started formulating her plans, so she gave Paul crushed up Halcion to put in her friend’s drinks so she could see how much it would take to knock somebody out. And of course then there were Tammy, Leslie, Jane, Kristen, and Norma. Karla didn’t seem to care if Paul used other girls as toys; she actually seemed to enjoy it.

There were only two things she hated: Paul doing it behind her back instead of including her, and the idea that one of these girls would steal Paul from her. Some people believe that, either knowingly or subconsciously, Karla killed Tammy intentionally. She knew how dangerous the Halothane was, but she put it right against Tammy’s face.

And when she called 911, she was already more worried about destroying evidence than about the safety of her sister. Karla was speaking to the 911 operator while she poured the Halothane down the drain and disposed of the remaining Halcion. If you recall, when the police officer who was speaking to Paul, Karla, and Lori got the call from the hospital that Tammy had died, Lori ran upstairs crying and the officer went after her to console her.

But what was Karla doing? Was she in tears over the loss of her youngest sister or trying to be there for her other sister? No, she had more important things to do.

When the police officer came back downstairs, he discovered that Karla had taken the Halothane rag and the blankets Tammy vomited on, put them into the washing machine, and turned it on. When he saw what she was doing he ran to try to stop her, but it was too late. Karla had washed away the evidence.

This wouldn’t have mattered if the coroner did a proper autopsy instead of calling it an accident, though it still would’ve said a lot about Karla’s mental state. Next there was Leslie. When Paul brought Leslie home, he excitedly ran upstairs to tell Karla but told her to stay in bed and be quiet for a bit.

Karla was not going to be left out, so she instead followed him and watched from the stairs for a while as he assaulted the young girl before eventually going back to bed. When Karla came downstairs the next morning, what she saw infuriated her. She didn’t care that the man she would be marrying in less than two weeks had kidnapped a 14 year old girl.

She didn’t care that he had raped her. But sitting on the table, after having been used the night before, were a pair of champagne flutes. These weren’t just any champagne flutes, either.

These were the good ones. They were the special, expensive pair of flutes she had ordered from France for her and Paul to drink from at their wedding. Karla could barely contain her rage, so she did the only thing she could do in that situation: she left Leslie alone in the house with Paul to continue being tortured while she took the dog for a walk to clear her head.

When she got home and still wasn’t ready to deal with Paul yet, she decided to go upstairs and continue the book she had been reading: American Psycho. Because of the way they disposed of Leslie’s body, there was never any way to determine her actual cause of death. According to Karla, Paul choked her with a black electrical cord.

According to Paul, Karla poisoned her with a lethal dose of Halcion. With Kristen, we do know that the cause of death was strangulation, but we don’t know which one of them did it. They each claimed the other did, and neither of them seems to be budging on that story.

But what we do know is that Paul left the house multiple times while Kristen was there to go get them takeout and rent movies. Karla portrayed herself as a helpless victim and an unwilling accomplice, but she was in the house alone with Kristen. She could have plugged the phone in and called the police or she could have untied Kristen so they could leave the house together, but she did nothing to help Kristen.

Instead, she turned on the 6 o’clock news so Kristen could see her father begging for her life. When Paul and Karla were going to go visit her parents for Easter, Paul claimed that he wanted to leave Kristen tied up for when they got back. He said that he didn’t want to kill her, but that Karla insisted.

The girl had seen their faces, seen their house, and knew Karla’s name. She was a loose end, and leaving her alive when she could possibly escape was too much of a liability. Then of course there was Jane, a girl who Paul was unlikely to have even known existed before Karla brought her over.

Karla chose Jane both because of her age, and because she looked so much like Tammy. The first night that Jane came over, Karla had said her husband wasn’t going to be home which was true. She had sent him away so she could prepare a surprise for him.

After Jane had been dosed with Halcion to fall unconscious, Karla called Paul and excitedly told him to come home so she could present him with his new wedding gift. But when Jane got sick from the Halothane that was used to keep her asleep and Paul refused to let Karla drug her anymore, things started to get out of control. Karla began getting resentful because she felt like she was losing Paul to Jane.

It was the same problem that she had with Norma, who Paul also refused to let her drug. Karla didn’t like when the victims were willing. She felt that they were supposed to be toys for her and Paul to use, not actual people who could drive a wedge between her and the man she thought was her perfect husband.

Paul always seemed to start pulling away from Karla when these other girls came to their house willingly, and it was something she couldn’t accept. While none of this was known to the public when the deal was made, much of it was known to the police. She was completely emotionless when she told police about the abduction and torture of Leslie Mahaffy, until she mentioned those champagne flutes.

It’s why they and the prosecution wanted the plea deal and the trial to take place in complete secrecy. But then John Rosen saw the tapes that brought him to tears. Then the police saw them.

Only the audio was played in open court while Karla described from the stand what was going on, but behind closed doors the jury had to watch the video as well. What they saw was not just Paul raping all of these girls, but Karla as well. In some of them Paul would direct her or bark orders at her, but she mostly did what she did on her own.

And according to everyone that saw them, she couldn’t have looked happier. The jury watched Karla perform sex acts on her own sister, on the two young girls that just wanted to be her friends, and on the strangers that she and Paul abducted, and they watched her do it all with a smile on her face. In the fireside chat video, it opened with the camera pointed at a naked Karla who gave Paul a drink before preparing to perform various sex acts on him.

Among the first things she said, while looking at his penis, was, “I love you, Snuffles. I loved when you fucked my little sister.” There’s a whole lot more of that and it gets far more graphic than I’d care to get into, but among the things she said are that they loved little girls, that she thought 13 was the best age, and that she wanted to have four children with Paul so he could have sex with them.

Some more gross stuff was said, then the camera was turned off and the tape started back up inside Tammy’s bedroom. Paul was using the camera to look around the room, then Karla emerged from out of frame, dressed in Tammy’s clothing and pretending to be her. More gross stuff was said, they had sex while Paul said “I love you, Tammy” to Karla, and then Paul walked over to turn the camera off while Karla smiled and waved at the camera.

Based on how the dialogue went, there’s an argument to be made that Karla was essentially following a script. Only the transcripts are available, not the audio. As soon as Paul had used up his last appeal, the tapes were all destroyed.

That’s absolutely what should have happened, but since I can’t hear the audio I can’t make a judgment call as to how Karla sounded. I’ll have to defer to those who did have to see the videos, and they agreed that Karla seemed to be a very active and willing participant. The Open Question There are a few commonly debated questions surrounding this case since the full truth of what happened is still unknown.

The first question that always comes up, which is pointless to debate, is which one of them was worse. Unless you are firmly of the belief that everything Karla did was the result of her continued abuse, which I am not, then it doesn’t matter who’s worse because they’re both fucking horrible and absolutely deserved to die in jail. The somewhat more interesting question is who actually killed Leslie and Kristen, and would Paul and Karla have still become murderers if they never met each other.

They were clearly both disturbed, but they seemed to feed off one another, bringing out the worst in each other. If they never met, would either or both of them have still wound up killing? I think the easier one to answer is Paul.

Without Karla, I don’t believe Paul would have killed anyone. He was a brutal, sadistic rapist, but when Karla wasn’t involved he always let his victims go. Even the one victim he stabbed was something that didn’t happened until after he met Karla.

He was brazen in his crimes, never hiding his face, and when he brought the hitchhiker home to assault he dropped her off afterwards. Obviously I know that crimes have a tendency to escalate, and there’s a strong chance that eventually rape wouldn’t have been enough for Paul. Given enough time it’s possible his crimes may have escalated to murder, but he was never going to get that time.

He had spent years being careless, and despite all of their blunders the police were still going to get the DNA results back when they did and arrest him. We also know Paul’s dream of having his virgin farm, and he wouldn’t be able to accumulate sex slaves if he kept killing them all. He had even forbid Karla from drugging girls after seeing how dangerous it was, which is one of the things that leads me to believe that Karla was the one to actually kill Leslie and Kristen.

She seemed far more concerned than Paul was with not getting arrested, and also hated that these girls were pulling his attention away from her. But whether or not Karla would have become a murderer regardless is really hard to say. When they were given psychological evaluations, Paul scored a 35 out of 40 on the psychopathy checklist.

To give you an idea of just how high a score that is, John Wayne Gacy scored 27 and Jeffrey Dahmer scored 23. Paul was a full on clinical psychopath, but Karla only scored 5 out of 40. She was considered a malignant narcissist, but doctors also said she was a diagnostic mystery.

Countless experts have examined Karla, and no one can come up with an answer. She is able to present herself as a typical, functioning person, but there’s a giant black hole inside her where her sense of morality should be. When she gave the police a tour of her house, detailing the events that took place during the kidnappings, Karla kept getting distracted.

In one sentence she would say how this is the spot where Paul performed some awful act of torture upon Leslie, and in the next sentence she’d ask the police if they could be careful not to damage her furniture. With no accepted diagnosis for Karla, it’s difficult to predict what she may have done without Paul in the picture. It’s been proposed that she has hybistophilia, also known as Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome, in which someone is attracted to people who display dark triad personality traits.

If this proposed explanation for Karla is the case, and indeed for many of the possible explanations for Karla’s behaviour, it’s possible that if it wasn’t Paul for whom she did these things, it would have been someone else. Aftermath On September 1, 1995, Paul was convicted on numerous charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole for at least 25 years, but he was also designated as a dangerous offender making it unlikely he will ever be let out.

He first became eligible for parole in 2018, but his request was denied. His second application for parole in 2021 was also denied. There is no reason to believe any future requests for parole are going to have a different result, and at least one of the monsters in today’s episode will rot in prison forever where he belongs.

Paul’s former attorney, Ken Murray, was charged with obstruction of justice for concealing the tapes for so long. He was acquitted in 2000, though the case raised a lot of ethical questions about Canada’s legal system. While the acquittal was surprising to many, it wasn’t really a bad ruling for reasons that are way more technical than we need to get into.

And then of course there’s Karla. She served 10 years of her sentence in maximum security prison, with a couple years in the middle being spent in medium security. While in prison she entered into a relationship with a fellow inmate who was a serial killer, learned to speak French, and obtained a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

After being released in 2005, Karla changed her name and moved to Quebec where she was less well known. She had divorced Paul after deciding to cooperate with the police, so she also wound up getting married again after prison. This time, her husband would be the brother of her lawyer.

They moved to the Caribbean but have since returned to Quebec, where nobody is happy to have her around. She currently lives a mostly normal life with her husband, three children, and the large social media network called Watching Karla Homolka that attempts to document her every move so the public can be aware of what she’s up to. I’d say that they were being overzealous, were it not for the fact that in 2017 Karla had been volunteering at an elementary school, presumably the one her children attended.

The day after that story broke, the school banned her from volunteering. I’m normally against vigilantism, but since only one of these monsters was sentenced to life in prison, it might be good that people are making sure the other is kept on a very tight leash. The only problem is that’s exactly what she’s into.

Key Takeaways Paul Bernardo was born with aphasia and a tongue mostly fused to the roof of his mouth, which affected his speech and social development. Bernardo’s father, Kenneth, was a convicted sex criminal who abused his daughter Debbie and other children. Paul Bernardo became known as the Scarborough Rapist, committing multiple rapes and assaults from 1987 to 1989.

Bernardo met Karla Homolka in 1987, and they began a controlling and abusive relationship. Bernardo and Homolka were convicted of kidnapping, raping, and murdering two teenage girls, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Frequently Asked Questions What was the name of the serial killer duo known as the ‘Ken and Barbie Killers’?

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were known as the ‘Ken and Barbie Killers’. What was Paul Bernardo’s childhood like? Paul Bernardo had a troubled childhood.

His parents, Marilyn and Kenneth, had a strained marriage, and Kenneth was physically and verbally abusive. Paul was born with aphasia and had a fused tongue, which affected his communication skills. His mother was depressed and agoraphobic, leading to neglect.

Kenneth was also a convicted sex criminal, which further distorted Paul’s view of the world. What was Karla Homolka’s childhood like? Karla Homolka had a more ordinary upbringing but was known for being obsessive, controlling, and moody.

She had a borderline genius IQ and was popular in school. She had a goth/punk phase and was known for upsetting people. Her father, Karel, was an alcoholic and verbally abusive, and her parents had an open marriage, which influenced Karla’s perception of relationships.

What was Paul Bernardo’s criminal history before he met Karla Homolka? Paul Bernardo was known as the ‘Scarborough Rapist,’ committing numerous sexual assaults from 1987 to 1990. He was brazen in his crimes, never hiding his face, and always let his victims go until he met Karla Homolka.

How did Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka meet? Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka met in October 1987 at a restaurant in a Howard Johnson hotel. Karla was 17 and working part-time at a pet store.

They had an immediate attraction and started a serious relationship. What role did Karla Homolka play in the crimes? Karla Homolka was an active participant in the crimes.

She helped plan and execute the abductions and assaults, and in some cases, she was the one who administered drugs to the victims. She also had a sexual relationship with Paul Bernardo and participated in the sexual assaults. What was the outcome of Paul Bernardo’s trial?

Paul Bernardo was convicted on numerous charges, including kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, and first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole for at least 25 years and was designated as a dangerous offender, making it unlikely he will ever be released. What was the outcome of Karla Homolka’s trial?

Karla Homolka pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter and served 12 years in prison. She was released in 2005 and has since changed her name and moved to Quebec, where she lives a mostly normal life with her husband and three children. What was the controversy surrounding Karla Homolka’s plea deal?

Karla Homolka’s plea deal, known as ‘the deal with the devil,’ was one of the most controversial in Canadian legal history. She pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter and served 12 years in prison in exchange for her testimony against Paul Bernardo. The deal was controversial because many believed she should have been charged with murder and received a longer sentence.

What was the significance of the tapes found in Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka’s house? The tapes found in Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka’s house were crucial evidence in their trial. They showed the couple’s involvement in the abductions, assaults, and murders of their victims.

The tapes also revealed Karla Homolka’s active participation in the crimes, which was a significant factor in her plea deal.

Key Takeaways

• Paul Bernardo was born with aphasia and a tongue mostly fused to the roof of his mouth, which affected his speech and social development.
• Bernardo’s father, Kenneth, was a convicted sex criminal who abused his daughter Debbie and other children.
• Paul Bernardo became known as the Scarborough Rapist, committing multiple rapes and assaults from 1987 to 1989.
• Bernardo met Karla Homolka in 1987, and they began a controlling and abusive relationship.
• Bernardo and Homolka were convicted of kidnapping, raping, and murdering two teenage girls, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the name of the serial killer duo known as the ‘Ken and Barbie Killers’?

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were known as the ‘Ken and Barbie Killers’.

What was Paul Bernardo’s childhood like?

Paul Bernardo had a troubled childhood. His parents, Marilyn and Kenneth, had a strained marriage, and Kenneth was physically and verbally abusive. Paul was born with aphasia and had a fused tongue, which affected his communication skills. His mother was depressed and agoraphobic, leading to neglect. Kenneth was also a convicted sex criminal, which further distorted Paul’s view of the world.

What was Karla Homolka’s childhood like?

Karla Homolka had a more ordinary upbringing but was known for being obsessive, controlling, and moody. She had a borderline genius IQ and was popular in school. She had a goth/punk phase and was known for upsetting people. Her father, Karel, was an alcoholic and verbally abusive, and her parents had an open marriage, which influenced Karla’s perception of relationships.

What was Paul Bernardo’s criminal history before he met Karla Homolka?

Paul Bernardo was known as the ‘Scarborough Rapist,’ committing numerous sexual assaults from 1987 to 1990. He was brazen in his crimes, never hiding his face, and always let his victims go until he met Karla Homolka.

How did Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka meet?

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka met in October 1987 at a restaurant in a Howard Johnson hotel. Karla was 17 and working part-time at a pet store. They had an immediate attraction and started a serious relationship.

What role did Karla Homolka play in the crimes?

Karla Homolka was an active participant in the crimes. She helped plan and execute the abductions and assaults, and in some cases, she was the one who administered drugs to the victims. She also had a sexual relationship with Paul Bernardo and participated in the sexual assaults.

What was the outcome of Paul Bernardo’s trial?

Paul Bernardo was convicted on numerous charges, including kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, and first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole for at least 25 years and was designated as a dangerous offender, making it unlikely he will ever be released.

What was the outcome of Karla Homolka’s trial?

Karla Homolka pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter and served 12 years in prison. She was released in 2005 and has since changed her name and moved to Quebec, where she lives a mostly normal life with her husband and three children.

What was the controversy surrounding Karla Homolka’s plea deal?

Karla Homolka’s plea deal, known as ‘the deal with the devil,’ was one of the most controversial in Canadian legal history. She pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter and served 12 years in prison in exchange for her testimony against Paul Bernardo. The deal was controversial because many believed she should have been charged with murder and received a longer sentence.

What was the significance of the tapes found in Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka’s house?

The tapes found in Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka’s house were crucial evidence in their trial. They showed the couple’s involvement in the abductions, assaults, and murders of their victims. The tapes also revealed Karla Homolka’s active participation in the crimes, which was a significant factor in her plea deal.

Sources

• Original Casual Criminalist video: Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The Ken and Barbie Killers
• Hero image source by Canmenwalker / openverse, by.

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