Finding Karla: How I Tracked Down an Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered a Mother of Three (Kindle Single) Read online

  Table Of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Credits

  Chapter One

  From the smudged window of the rattling prop plane, I see the Caribbean up close for the first time. It’s exactly as advertised: emerald ovals of jungle floating in turquoise water under baby-blue sky. I’d love to have a bikini in my bag and a holiday by the sea. But that’s not in the cards. I’m here to find a serial killer. I won’t have time for the beach.

  It’s dark by the time the island customs officer finally waves me out into soft air and the songs of a thousand night frogs. Even this late, it’s as warm and humid as a July morning back in Toronto.

  The few passengers on my flight flee to idling cars, and I’m alone except for a circle of cabbies sharing a cigarette. They turn in unison to stare, unsmiling, at the white woman carrying a small green suitcase and two notebooks. The research they contain is the blueprint for one of the wildest gambits of my life: trying to find Canada’s most despised and feared female serial killer, Karla Homolka.

  Almost twenty years ago now, Canadians were both fascinated and horrified by the crimes committed by Homolka and her husband, Paul Bernardo. And Canadians weren’t alone — the photogenic couple made headlines around the world. Bernardo and Homolka were instantly dubbed the “Ken and Barbie Killers,” star-crossed lovers who’d drugged, raped and killed young schoolgirls in southern Ontario. Incredibly, one of the dead was Homolka’s own baby sister.

  Today, a pallid Bernardo is serving a life sentence in a Canadian maximum-security prison. He’s been designated a dangerous offender and likely will never see the sky beyond a penned exercise yard.

  Not so Homolka. Canadian prosecutors — and a majority of psychiatric experts — bought the claim she was a battered woman and she traded her eyewitness testimony to Bernardo’s sex and death campaign for a light, twelve-year prison sentence. It didn’t matter that Bernardo’s lawyers later turned over videotapes showing Homolka drugging and raping her own fifteen-year-old sister and participating, with Bernardo, in the sexual assaults of two other girls of roughly the same age, who were also killed. By the time those damning videos surfaced, her plea bargain was sealed and deemed irreversible. Homolka walked free in 2005 to restart her life in the city of Montreal.

  Two years later, Karla Homolka simply vanished.

  I am now determined to find her, and all my instincts have led me to this small island deep in the Caribbean.

  Of course, there are no guarantees she is — or ever was — here. Even if she were hiding in this dense jungle or along these serpentine streets that seem to lead nowhere, I may never find her. This is an exponentially long shot.

  On the Web, stalkers, sleuths and gossips insist she’s changed her name, dyed her long blonde hair and switched from speaking English to French — a skill she’d honed in prison, along with earning a university degree in psychology.

  Searching the Caribbean for Homolka could easily take six months. I have six days.

  Chapter Two

  When my cab finally pulls up to the island hotel, I’m relieved to see it’s well lit and clean.

  The front-desk clerk eyes me suspiciously: “Really, you are on holiday alone? Where is your husband? He should be with you, yes?” In Canada, I’d have joked about the sexism, but here in these closely knit island communities, I need to keep a low profile. I’m not going to find who I’m looking for if I draw too much attention.

  I assure the clerk that my husband, busy working, will eventually join me. He nods and hands me two sets of keys. Every day, several times a day, the hotel staff ask whether he has arrived.

  In reality, my husband is a veteran television producer working to a tight deadline of his own back in Canada, but he’s fully supportive of my solo mission. He’s seen me come home safely from dangerous assignments: covering the drug cartels and escalating violence against women in Mexico and Honduras; exposing mining exploitation in Guatemala; confronting the psychotic and psychopathic, the drug-crazed and the fraudsters. This journey didn’t seem any more threatening.

  The first thing I do when I find my hotel room is pick up the local telephone book. Information technology on many of these islands is way behind that of the rest of the world. The reverse telephone directories journalists back home routinely use to track addresses don’t exist here. Of course, I hardly expect Homolka to have a listing, but you can’t make assumptions. People, as I will soon discover, often slip up on the simplest things.

  The morning of May 4, Karla Homolka’s forty-second birthday, blooms bright yellow and blue amidst a gentle tropical breeze. But just after noon, the sky suddenly turns slate and explodes into blinding torrents of wind and rain. Cars pull off the roads, lizards shoot under porches, children splash quickly home through pond-sized puddles. Even in the tropics, where locals are accustomed to a few daily downpours, the freak storm has everybody talking.

  I stand at the curved white railing of the hotel veranda and watch the surging sea. I wonder whether there’s any chance that Karla Homolka is staring out at the same bruised sky and frenzied rain. I’ve read she believes in spirits and signs. Perhaps she sees this vicious storm ruining her birthday as a foreshadowing of more upheaval to come. Or perhaps she feels confident that, after all this time, she’s truly shaken the journalists and critics she so loathes. How firmly does she believe that she’ll live out the rest of her years without further reminder of the ceaseless curiosity and repulsion of an entire nation?

  Chapter Three

  Three plane rides away from these tropics, Homolka’s backstory remains seared into Canada’s national conscience, largely because of the media storm it unleashed when the pretty blonde and her tall, confident husband were unmasked as the country’s most notorious rapists and serial killers.

  Karla Leanne Homolka, the eldest of three sisters, grew up in the quiet town of St. Catharines, a ninety-minute drive from Toronto. The vivacious young woman did well in school, loved animals, worked at a pet shop, and wanted more than anything to marry a handsome, successful man who would give her a diamond ring and children.

  Pretty and popular at seventeen, Homolka had already begun to explore her sexuality with a boyfriend. But the night she met twenty-three-year-old Bernardo in a Toronto-area restaurant, innocence disappeared. He was older by six years, a man with a good job and enough charm to get her into bed that very night. But things were less than ideal from the start. Rather than romantic intimacy, Homolka and Bernardo opted to have hours of noisy sex in her hotel room, while her girlfriend and Bernardo’s buddy stayed on the couch a few feet away.

  It didn’t take long for Bernardo, who was born in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, to ease himself into the Homolka household. But to Karla’s great annoyance, Bernardo soon became obsessed with her youngest sister, Tammy, and fiendishly fixated on taking her virginity. Rather than end the sick relationship and warn her family, Homolka stole animal anaesthetic from her workplace and offered her unconscious sister up to Bernardo — twice. In the early morning hours of December 24, 1990, Homolka even climbed between her sister’s limp legs to perform oral sex and assault her — all for Bernardo to videotape.

  Tammy died that night. She was fifteen years old. Many accepted that she’d choked on her own vom
it, mainly because her big sister lied to police, saying Tammy had made herself sick by over-drinking. Years later, forensic experts would reanalyze the evidence and conclude she’d probably been smothered by the anaesthetic-soaked cloth pressed to her face by her big sister.

  One rival was dead, but Bernardo now had a green light to bring his victims home. Shortly after Tammy’s death, the newly engaged couple rented a cute clapboard house in the St. Catharines suburb of Port Dalhousie, a pretty neighbourhood on the lake near enough to the Homolkas to go home for dinner often.

  On June 14, 1991, just six months after Tammy’s death, Homolka was happily fussing over details of her forthcoming fairytale nuptials. Bernardo, meanwhile, trolled the suburbs and kidnapped fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy from the lakeside town of Burlington, less than an hour away from St. Catharines.

  Homolka took a break from choosing centrepieces and fabric swatches to join her fiancé in the torture, rape and murder of the terrified teen. After Bernardo decapitated and sawed Mahaffy into pieces, they were set in concrete. Homolka would tell police that the only block she helped him carry to the car was the one that contained the torso because it weighed two hundred pounds. At Bernardo’s trial, it would be revealed that Homolka was upset by the fact that he’d shared champagne with Mahaffy in their best crystal flutes. How dare he.

  Almost two weeks after Mahaffy’s abduction, in quaint Niagara-on-the-Lake, a triumphant Homolka in an impossibly white Cinderella wedding dress walked down the aisle with her handsome prince. Like a scene by Walt Disney (whose movies the bride adored), the seemingly perfect pair rode off in a horse-drawn carriage, waving from on high. Later, a hundred guests dined on pheasant under glass while sickened rescuers pulled Mahaffy’s cement-encased body parts from nearby Gibson Lake.

  Within a year of their Hawaiian honeymoon, the Barbie and Ken Killers went hunting again — this time, together.

  Just as I remember the awful day Burlington’s Leslie Mahaffy was dragged — in pieces — from Lake Gibson, I will always recall fifteen-year-old Kristen French’s disappearance in April 1992. We were already reeling from a spate of horrible deaths in Burlington, my hometown, in 1991, during what became known as the Summer of Sorrows: the joyride that ended with four teens sealed in a car, burning to death while helpless firefighters looked on; Leslie Mahaffy’s kidnapping as she came back from a candlelight vigil for the dead teens, followed by the sickening news that she was dead and decapitated. Next, young Nina De Villiers was snatched while out for a run and turned up murdered near Kingston, Ontario. It seemed the slaughter would never end.

  I remember, too, the horror and despair when, later, French’s strangled, nude body was found dumped in a ditch in Burlington. It had been Homolka, holding a map and pretending to be lost in the streets of St. Catharines, who’d lured the pretty brunette in a Catholic school uniform into Bernardo’s getaway car. French would be raped, sodomized, tortured and eventually strangled. Homolka and Bernardo took turns holding the video camera that recorded the girl’s agony.

  Then, after eighteen months of marriage, the fairytale fraud was over. In December 1992, Bernardo viciously beat his wife with a flashlight. She filed charges, started divorce proceedings, and offered to tell all to the police. Only later, when it was judged to be too late, did the world realize that Homolka had employed a very self-serving definition of “all.”

  Homolka’s 1993 testimony and guilty plea, exchanged for a twelve-year sentence on two counts of manslaughter, would secure Bernardo’s murder conviction for the Mahaffy and French murders. With the help of DNA evidence, he would also be convicted for the numerous unsolved Scarborough Rapist crimes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But during Bernardo’s trial in 1995, Homolka’s earlier plea bargain would be denounced as “a deal with the devil.” Already wary of the soft-spoken blonde who’d stood by her murdering man, Canadians exploded in rage when the couple’s home sex videos — finally turned over by Bernardo’s lawyers after fourteen months — seemed to provide horrifying proof that Homolka had been her husband’s ally. While some experts had insisted she was a compliant victim, the press and the public largely believed she was a psychopath or a malignant narcissist who’d drawn her symptoms from a psychology textbook.

  Yet after serving a dozen years in prison, during which she is said to have taken lovers, and despite parole board fears that she could strike again, Homolka walked free from Ste. Anne des Plaines prison in Quebec, Canada. She was just thirty-five years old. Her future awaited her.

  Homolka planned to settle in the province of Quebec, where her case was less infamous than in her native Ontario. She tried unsuccessfully to have her name changed legally to “Emily Chiara Tremblay.” Upon her release, she gave a single media interview to SRC, Canada’s French-language public broadcaster. Beside her sat her new lawyer, Sylvie Bordelais, a woman who would become increasingly important in Homolka’s life.

  On camera, Homolka appeared quite at ease speaking in her newly polished French. She assured Canadians that she was no longer a threat to their children and that she would never forgive herself for what had happened. But when asked what she wanted to do next, she replied, “This is stupid. I’d like to have an iced cappuccino. An iced cappuccino from Tim Hortons. That’s what I’d like to do.”

  Even now, decades after the depraved crimes and years into her vanishing act, Homolka and Bernardo remain Canada’s most notorious serial killers, and Homolka’s lenient plea bargain the emblem of police bungling and judicial betrayal.

  Over the years, psychology experts have fared no better, often reaching conflicting and confusing diagnoses. Compliant victim or manipulative psychopath? Sadist, malignant narcissist, pedophile — or victim herself?

  That mystery, and her heinous crimes, have catapulted Karla Homolka into Canadian headlines time and again. In the late spring of 2012, she resurfaced in another horrific trial of child rape and murder.

  Just like Kristen French, eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford was abducted after school in Woodstock, Ontario, lured by a young woman working on behalf of a child predator. It was April 8, 2009. Terri-Lynne McClintic, a troubled eighteen-year-old who thought she was dating Michael Rafferty, a man ten years older, stood by while Rafferty raped the little girl she had delivered to him. That night, he downloaded a video about the sadistic crimes of Homolka and Bernardo. He was later convicted of Stafford’s rape and murder.

  With Homolka’s deal with the devil still stuck in the craw of the criminal justice system, many Canadians cheered when McClintic was sentenced to life imprisonment, although she’d done far less than the Barbie Killer.

  Michael Rafferty’s murder trial in the spring of 2012 got me thinking about Karla Homolka more closely. And that was before police erroneously suggested there could be a link between Homolka and a notorious porn actor named Luka Magnotta. In May 2012, Magnotta allegedly killed and dismembered a male lover in Montreal, then mailed his body parts to the offices of two major Canadian political parties and to at least two schools on Canada’s west coast.

  I was already at work on a new book about the fate of violent criminals after they left prison. While Homolka would fit squarely within my study, she’d always seemed too difficult and expensive to find. Yet, was there any chance she’d teamed up again with a psychopath in search of prey? Where in the world was Karla Homolka?

  I opened my laptop and plugged her name into the search engine. Within minutes, I was sick with dread. Sure, there was the long-running speculation about which pseudonym she might be using and where she might have fled. But I noticed something new — at least new to me. Bloggers were now reporting that Homolka was teaching schoolchildren in the Caribbean. Karla Homolka teaching children?

  I recalled that justice officials had worried about this too. Shortly before her prison release in 2005, a Quebec court made a rare order limiting Homolka’s freedom even after she’d served every minute of her sentence. Specifically, she was forbidden from being with people under the age o
f sixteen and consuming drugs other than prescription medicine. She was also required to continue therapy and counselling. But Homolka and her lawyer fought back, and the restrictions were lifted.

  Upon her release, Homolka was free. She could leave Canada as long as she could find a country willing to take her. She was free to start a new life, anywhere, doing anything.

  But teaching children? Even if she’d received a pardon — something Canadian politicians passed a special law in 2010 to prevent — she would never have been legally able to hide her crimes against children from a potential employer. If she were far away, though, using a pseudonym, or in a country lacking access to Canadian criminal records, anything was possible. If there was a chance she was teaching children, many Canadians would want to know. And the only way to know was to find her.

  Chapter Four

  The lawyer, the journalist and the citizen in me were suddenly conflicted.

  Yes, Homolka had done her time – and been a model prisoner. A couple of judges had ruled that her sentence, while short, was a proper plea bargain necessary to put Paul Bernardo, a vicious sadist, away for life. We all remember the relief. But others insisted that Homolka’s sentence wasn’t even long enough to enable experts to determine whether she was likely to reoffend. In fact, the parole board had forced Homolka to serve every moment of her sentence because they thought she just might. (Not to mention that shortening her notoriously lenient sentence would have been a public relations disaster.) As a journalist who had covered facets of the Homolka case, I knew the question of her potential to kill again not been put to rest at the time of her release — certainly not in the minds of average citizens.

  That’s one of the reasons a Quebec court refused Homolka’s 2005 request to ban the media from divulging details of her new life. On what would have been Homolka and Bernardo’s fourteenth wedding anniversary, the judge ruled that the public had a right to know where she was and what she was doing because of the severity of her crimes and because another court had found she was still dangerous. It was also, he said, a matter of press freedom.