KARLA HOMOLKA – THE KEN & BARBIE KILLERS

Saint Catharines, Ontario has a floral smell to it, it is one of the biggest exporters of tulips and other bulbed flowers in Canada. But the cloying smell of their beauty fades in the winter when the snow packs and everyone hides inside to keep warm. Those who have to go out to shop or work hurry along as much as possible. But a lovely blonde lingers along at the Martindale Animal Clinic where she works well past closing time. Her name is Karla Homolka and she is looking for drugs to use on young girls to knock them unconscious so they can be raped and videotaped.

Most women would not participate in helping their fiancée rape young women. But this woman, Karla Homolka is what is called a hybristophiliac: someone who derives pleasure from initiating, seeing and participating in the sexual pain and torture of others. And in the next few years, she and her fiancée Paul Bernardo will not only cause sexual pain and torture, murder will be on the agenda as well. The undoing of them will be their own videotapes of the sexual abuse of several young women, three of whom wind up dead.

TRICK OR TREAT

In October of 1987 Karla went to a convention for pet store workers in Toronto. At the time, the store was The Number One Pet Center and Karla was 17 years old. Halloween trick and treats were on her mind being away from the tiny suburb of Saint Catherines. She and her friend who came with her snuck down to the hotel restaurant for a late night snack while their manager slept in the next room. While they ate, a pair of older men came into the lounge and seeing Karla and her friend, changed their minds and came over to the table. Karla smiled and the blonde, baby faced man sat down. “I’m Paul,” he said. And by the time they were in the elevator going up to their room, Paul Bernardo, her future husband and Karla were furiously groping each other and kissing. They got to the room and in front of her friend had sex for hours. She wasn’t a virgin and there was no false modesty. They showered together in the morning and when they left, Karla knew what she wanted: Paul. And she knew what to use to get it.

What she didn’t know was that Paul was a sexual sadist and had raped several of his past girlfriends. He manipulated many women and had a varied appetite of pornography, sadism and abuse of all kinds on several of the women he was dating when he met Karla. But when the truth came to light, Karla didn’t care. She showed him her own pair of police style handcuffs and invited him to use them on her. He was thrilled and bragged to his friends that he could get her to do anything he wanted. Little did he know, he was being used as much as he was using her. She suspected he was involved in some sexual crimes and since she saw him as the man of her dreams, that was a minor infraction that she could endure. Really, it was a little exciting to be involved with someone that had done something so bad. And Karla set things up for him: love notes, anal sex at his request, lobster dinner on his birthday and anything else he wanted. He liked to be called the King when Karla was performing sexual duties on him. And whatever the King wanted, he got.

Christmas came of  1990 and Karla was still pleasing her man. He had all but admitted to her that he was the man the police were calling “The Scarborough Rapist” and was suspected of viciously raping 11 women. That turned Karla on. She wished she’d been there to watch while he had acted out his fantasies. He loved Karla but when they’d met, she was not a virgin. But her younger sister Tammy was. Karla hated seeing Paul laugh when Tammy would sit on his lap and giggle, asking if she was prettier than Karla. Even though Paul had asked Karla to marry him, she was bitter when she saw Paul kiss Tammy. It didn’t matter that he was a rapist. Those were women to be used and thrown away, good for nothing else but sexual play toys. But Tammy, sweet and virginal, was a threat. Karla narrowed her hateful eyes and formulated a plan to show Tammy who Paul belonged to once and for all.

Paul had bought a video camera to tape all the Christmas festivities he and Karla were planning to engage in. In every daiquiri of Tammy’s, Karla put crushed Halcion, a sleeping pill. She proceeded to get more and more intoxicated. “Are there supposed to be two of you?” She asked, her words slurring. Paul and Karla looked at each other. Everyone else was asleep and Tammy was ready to be raped. Karla got the camera ready to document it, so they could watch it later while having sex. When her head slumped over, Karla poured Halothane, an anesthetic on a cloth and held it over Tammy’s mouth. “Let’s go,” said Paul and they began to assault her, taking turns behind the camera and Paul directing Karla. She later claimed she was disgusted but it is hard to say what she was disgusted by; the act or that it was her sister? But Tammy’s neck was crimped during the assault and she was not breathing. Karla and Paul realized she was choking on her own vomit and called 911. They saw she had a raspberry colored mark on her face from the Halothane soaked cloth and a long smear of blood on Tammy’s thigh and hid the bottle, the towel and the videotape. They got lucky with Tammy. Her death was declared an accident and they had their own private sex show to watch whenever they wished. Karla’s competition was out of the way.

Karla and Paul decided to move out of the Homolka house after Tammy’s funeral. Karla’s parents decided they didn’t want to foot the bill for such a high dollar wedding after having to pay for Tammy’s funeral. Karla and Paul were beyond incensed. This was Karla’s big show and damned if she didn’t have it planned to the nines. Reports show that Karla even picked up her confetti cards for her wedding on the day of Tammy’s funeral. They moved into a motel, at the request of Dorothy and Karel, Karla’s parents. They wanted to grieve properly and with Paul and Karla’s behavior, they felt they couldn’t. The couple went looking for a house and found one in a small suburb called Port Dalhousie. Paul managed to fool the owners and lied about his job. At that time he was unemployed, and Karla was the only one working. The house had a huge basement and Karla was already planning the female guests they would have over. She could hardly wait.

“I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT”

Karla was being pushed around by Paul on a regular basis now but considered it the price to pay to have young girls at her disposal. They made videos of themselves having sex and Karla pretending to be Tammy. In one, Karla is seen telling Paul that they should get as many young girls as they can. They are the virgins of Paul and they should take them and make them even more theirs. Why? “Because I can do anything I want,” she says to the camera, licking her lips. The actual tapes have supposedly been destroyed and very few people have had access to them. The people who were in court during the trial of Paul Bernardo did not see but heard the audio portion of the tape. Portions of the autopsy of Tammy Lyn Homolka were sold to the HBO show, “Autopsy” and I have viewed that. There are also home movies of them in a non-sexual manner that I have seen. The most notorious is the case of Steven Williams who wrote the book, “Invisible Darkness”. His descriptions were so graphic that he was charged with breaking the publication ban, accused of having seen the tapes because the descriptions were so precise.

Karla drugged a young girl that had been a friend of Tammy’s and called Paul on his cell phone. She told him to come home; she had a surprise for him. When he got there, they did the same thing to her they had done to Tammy. On the tape, Karla is smiling and touching herself all over. She is fully engaged in this girl’s rape. She is no one’s victim. Of course the whole thing was captured on video for future enjoyment so there is proof that Karla was not only an active participant, but also that she initiated the rape. She reportedly is only wearing a small tank top and no panties while she performs for the camera with the comatose girl. Paul was thrilled. He could get Karla to do anything he wanted. Soon he would marry her and control her completely. A wife can’t testify against a husband, after all. He was still raping women, usually the younger the better. He liked to take a little souvenir from every rape and eventually many pairs of underwear, driver’s licenses, cosmetics, and all kinds of women’s belongings ultimately connected to the rapes of dozens of women in the greater Port Dalhousie area were found in their home.

TO HONOR AND OBEY

June 29,1991 was a beautiful day for a wedding in nearby Niagara Falls. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were driven by white, horse drawn carriage to the little church where they would become man and wife. Karla was thrilled. This was the day she’d been waiting for all her life. A June bride, resplendent in a white dress. But there was one more secret on June 29: a couple of fishermen were finding concrete blocks with cut up body parts in nearby Lake Gibson. Paul and Karla had cut up a teenage girl Paul had brought home and raped. Karla had been asleep and had no idea where Paul was that night. She was hoping he’d bring home a play toy for her to play with. It was always so exciting for her to have sex with someone new that he had found. Killing them or dumping them somewhere afterward didn’t matter to Karla. The phone rang and Paul told her,” I brought someone home Kar,” he said. “Don’t come down until I come up for you, okay?”

She wasn’t happy but knew better than to argue. In the morning she saw her best champagne flutes on the coffee table and began to do a slow burn. This girl was going to get the Tammy treatment. Maybe even worse. Paul and the girl were passed out in a downstairs bedroom and it was obvious she’d been smacked around a few times. Karla waited for Paul to bring her out. Her name turned out to be Leslie Mahaffy and what Paul got, Karla wanted. He set up the video camera and told Karla that while he was out casing houses to burglarize, he ran into Leslie who had been locked out of her house for missing curfew, asked Paul for a cigarette and when he told her he had one in his car that was his moment to pull a knife on her. Karla just stared. She wasn’t her type. Not at all, but if that’s all she had to choose from, then it was all right. Paul wanted Karla to have fun with Leslie. It would make what was coming less of a chore when she had to be killed. The video camera was set up and music was on. Leslie still couldn’t see Karla and Karla knew that gave her the advantage as Paul started to direct the rape scenes between Karla and Leslie. Karla began to relax and enjoy herself, even though Leslie was crying and scared. She gave her a white teddy bear to hold and two sleeping pills when they were finished having sex with her. Paul got an electrical cord and slipped it around Leslie’s neck. Karla watched as he strangled her to death, wondering where they were going to put her body.

They next day Karla and Paul, with help from a chainsaw, cut Leslie’s body into 8 pieces and encased them in concrete. Each has blamed the other for the dismemberment; it’s hard to say who was fully responsible. I believe it was probably both of them. But they took the body parts in concrete and threw them off a bridge into Lake Gibson, where it was found in a frightening coincidence on their wedding day. By this time Karla was a full-fledged sexual deviant, although she had painted a picture of herself of a battered wife. She loved to talk about the animals at the clinic and her job and how she wished she and Paul could have kids. But that was the last thing she wanted. She was happy with the life they had, torturing young girls and raping them. And if the lives of their sex toys had to end when it was over, well, so be it. They were nothing to Karla.

Paul kept to his raping of girls without letting Karla be present, which she hated. But on Good Friday, right before Easter on April 16,1992 they went out and kidnapped another young girl. Fifteen-year-old Kristen French wasn’t the type of girl to get locked out in the middle of the night to be taught a lesson. They pushed her in their car after school was out and threatened her at knifepoint. She screamed, ”You bastard!” at Paul and Karla yanked her waist length brunette hair. She was very attractive and Karla was excited. She ran around the house shutting the blinds and unplugging the phones. Kristen had no blindfold on; she saw their faces and what the house looked like. But when she was finished, Paul smacked her across the face hard for not sticking to the plan, for letting Kristen lose her shoe. Karla’s face burned as Paul took their pretty new friend into the music room where he kept his turntables and keyboards. A painful red welt was raising on Karla’s face as she thought, another little bitch who needs to be taught a lesson.

Kristen was strong and defiant. She wouldn’t say or do some of the sexual things Paul said and he was getting mad. But Karla was going to get hers, and set up the camera. Over the long holiday weekend they kept her captive, she was beaten and raped repeatedly, longer than their other victims. In court, Karla actually claimed to have made friends with her, although I have no idea how you can force friendship on someone you are raping on camera. But again, before they were supposed to have Easter dinner with Karla’s family, they decided there was no way they could let Kristen live. She would go directly to the police. They took an electrical cord; looped it around her neck and Karla watched Paul choke Kristen to death. The killings were hard for her to watch. She was more interested in having sex and making Paul happy so he wouldn’t hit her. But it seemed like there were more and more problems and now they had to get rid of Kristen’s body too. They shaved her hair to get carpet shavings out of it, and destroyed her clothes and Mickey Mouse watch. They wound up dumping her nude body on the side of the road, after keeping her for 4 days.

THIS WAS THAT TIME

Karla liked to tell people that there was a time for everything. Paul was starting to unravel. He stabbed her in the leg with a screwdriver, he watched the Tammy tape obsessively. He hit her and pushed her down the stairs, saying Leslie was coming for her. That scared Karla. He was still smuggling cigarettes and selling them over the Canadian border. One night he told Karla she was coming with him and during the trip, he hit her in the back of the head so hard with a flashlight that her eyes became black and swollen. Her friend made a secret phone call to her parents and told them what was going on: that Paul was beating Karla badly. They went to their house and seeing her face, were shocked. She thought for a few moments and even though she was scared of Paul, she was more scared of the police charging her with the murders.. She let her parents take her to the hospital where the doctor was so flabbergasted by her condition that he declared it the worst case of wife abuse he’d ever seen. Little did Karla know the police were investigating Paul for more than that. They’d been looking for him for some time. This was that time.

DNA had been taken literally years ago in the Scarborough Rapist case on Paul. It was just dumb luck that they got Karla and out of fear, she told them about Kristen and Leslie. Tammy was a horrible accident that didn’t count in her eyes. She blamed everything on Paul and said she had been a battered wife. She didn’t talk about the tapes that showed her licking her lips, flipping up her skirt with Kristen and enjoying the sex acts. The DNA came back a match and Paul was picked up: he was going to jail for a long time. Karla however, thought she was going to be able to get total immunity. Her lawyer, George Walker shot a hole in that idea pretty fast. There was no way she was going to avoid doing time. And then there were the tapes. Where were they?

Karla managed to strike a deal that has been nicknamed, “The Deal With The Devil”. She would serve 12 years: 5 years for Leslie and Kristen and 2 for her sister Tammy. The tapes still had not been shown because Paul’s horrible lawyer had them. If the Crown had seen them and seen her level of participation that deal would have been useless. After the tapes were seen, everyone was even more disgusted . She had more than a hand in the murders and had initiated the rapes of both Jane Doe [ Tammy’s friend] and Tammy. Paul was declared a dangerous offender and will be incarcerated for the rest of his life. Karla did her time in a country club type prison in Canada. There are many photos of her on the net enjoying herself with her lesbian lover, Lynda Verrenau. She was released in 2005 and met a man she ultimately married. She gave birth to a boy last January and has no parole restrictions. She has since moved to the Caribbean, I suspect where she has some privacy. She is free to do what she wants. Her husband can stay home with the baby while she walks the beach, in a bikini, her blonde hair tossing. All the while looking for a partner who will help her find a taste of blood…..