On May 18, 1993, Karla Homolka appeared in an Ontario courtroom and was arraigned on two counts of manslaughter. Four days earlier her lawyer had closed a deal with the Crown: she would testify against her husband, Paul Bernardo, and in return she would serve twelve years. On the same day she was arraigned, Bernardo's lawyer, Ken Murray, sat down and watched six small eight-millimeter videotapes that he had recovered from the couple's house, from a hiding place the police had missed. The tapes showed the rapes of three teenage girls who were dead and a fourth who was alive. They showed Homolka taking part. Murray kept them for sixteen months. By the time the Crown saw them, the deal Canada would come to call the deal with the devil had been signed and performed, and it could not be undone.
The first girl on the tapes was Homolka's own sister. Karla herself was born on May 4, 1970, in the Port Credit area of Mississauga. Tammy Lyn Homolka was born on New Year's Day 1975, the youngest of three daughters in a family that had moved from Port Credit to St. Catharines, and she was fifteen in the summer of 1990 when Bernardo, then Karla's fiance, began paying her attention. By Karla's own later account, she decided to help him. In July, Bernardo testified, they served Tammy a spaghetti dinner laced with Valium that Karla had taken from the veterinary clinic where she worked; he stopped when the girl began to wake. Karla then stole halothane, an anesthetic gas, from the clinic. On the night of December 23, 1990, after a Christmas party at the Homolka house, they drugged Tammy again, held a halothane-soaked cloth to her face, and raped her while she was unconscious. She vomited and choked.
What they did in the next few minutes was the first thing investigators would later hold against both of them. Before calling 911, they hid what they had used, did the laundry, dressed Tammy again and moved her to her basement bedroom. She was pronounced dead at St. Catharines General Hospital without regaining consciousness. There was a red mark on her face, a chemical burn from the halothane. Bernardo told police he had tried to revive her. The coroner ruled the death an accident.
Six months later, on June 7, 1991, Karla invited a fifteen-year-old girl she had befriended at a pet store two years earlier to the house. The girl was known in the trials only as Jane Doe. Karla drugged her, and both of them sexually assaulted her while the camera ran. In August the girl came back and was drugged again, and this time she stopped breathing. Karla called 911, then canceled the ambulance after they revived her.
Before dawn on June 15, 1991, Bernardo was driving through Burlington, halfway between Toronto and St. Catharines, to steal license plates. Leslie Erin Mahaffy was standing outside her house. She was fourteen. She had been at a friend's wake, had missed her curfew, and found herself locked out. Bernardo told her he was casing a house to break into, and when she asked if he had a cigarette he said there were some in his car. At the car he blindfolded her, forced her in, and drove to the house he and Karla were renting in Port Dalhousie. Over the next day the two of them filmed themselves raping and torturing her. At some point Leslie said her blindfold was slipping. The next day she was dead. Each of them later said the other killed her: Karla testified that Bernardo strangled her, and Bernardo said Karla gave her a lethal dose of the sedative triazolam. In 2005, days before Homolka's release, he told police and his lawyer, Tony Bryant, that he had always meant to let the girls go and that when Leslie's blindfold slipped it was Karla who feared she would identify him, and who had planned to kill her by injecting an air bubble into her bloodstream.
They kept her body in the basement through a Father's Day dinner with Karla's parents and her surviving sister, Lori. Then Bernardo bought a dozen bags of cement, kept the receipts, cut the body into pieces with his grandfather's circular saw, and set each piece in concrete. The couple dropped the blocks into Lake Gibson, south of Port Dalhousie. One of them, about two hundred pounds, was too heavy to sink properly and lay near the shore, where a man named Michael Doucette and his son, Michael Jr., found it while fishing on June 29, 1991. Leslie was identified by her orthodontic brace. That summer, Bernardo and Homolka were married in Niagara-on-the-Lake in a lavish ceremony, with vows Bernardo had written for her in which she promised to obey him.
Kristen Dawn French was fifteen, a student at Holy Cross Secondary School in St. Catharines who walked the same route home every afternoon because her dog needed feeding. On April 16, 1992, as she passed Grace Lutheran Church, Homolka got out of a car in the church parking lot holding a map and asked for directions. When Kristen leaned in to look, Bernardo came up behind her with a knife and forced her into the front seat, and Homolka held her by the hair from the back. Kristen's parents knew something was wrong within minutes of when she should have been home and called the police. By the next day officers had found witnesses to the abduction and one of her shoes in the lot. The couple kept her through the Easter weekend and filmed what they did to her. Unlike Leslie, she was never blindfolded, which the Crown prosecutor, Ray Houlahan, told Bernardo's jury meant he had always intended to kill her. On April 19 she was strangled, and the couple went to Easter dinner at the Homolkas'. Her body was found on April 30 in a ditch in Burlington, not far from the cemetery where Leslie was buried. It had been washed and her hair had been cut off. Karla testified that Bernardo strangled Kristen for seven minutes while she watched. Bernardo said Karla had beaten her with a rubber mallet when she tried to escape and that Kristen died in a noose tied to a hope chest, after which Karla went to fix her own hair. Homolka testified that the hair had been cut off to make identification harder, not kept as a trophy.
The case against the couple did not come from any of those killings. In January 1993, after Bernardo beat Homolka with a flashlight, she left him. By then a DNA sample he had given years earlier had matched him to the Scarborough rapes, a series of attacks on women in suburban Toronto, and detectives came to talk to her. She told her family what she knew, hired a lawyer, and began to negotiate. Bernardo was arrested on February 17, 1993. The police searched the house in Port Dalhousie for weeks and did not find the tapes. On May 6, Murray retrieved them from where they had been hidden.
The Crown's position in the spring of 1993 was weak in a way the public could not see. Without the tapes, its case against Bernardo for the two murders depended on Homolka, and Homolka could only be useful if a jury believed her. She presented herself as a battered wife who had done what she did out of terror. On May 14 the prosecutors agreed that she would plead guilty to manslaughter in the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French and testify against Bernardo, and that the Crown would recommend twelve years. Her part in her sister's death was disclosed and taken into account. Her trial was held between June 28 and July 6, 1993, under a publication ban that the Crown asked for, that Justice Francis Kovacs of the Ontario Court, General Division, imposed on July 5, and that Homolka's lawyers supported while Bernardo's argued it would prejudice him; the public was kept out. On July 6 she was sentenced to two concurrent terms of twelve years.
The ban was meant to protect Bernardo's right to a fair trial, and it leaked across the border almost immediately. Newspapers in Buffalo, Detroit, New York and Washington printed what they could learn, American television ran programs on the case, and a Usenet group spread the testimony. Canadians smuggled copies of The Buffalo News home, and Niagara police were told to confiscate them at the border. A retired officer named Gordon Domm was convicted of disobeying a court order for handing out details from the foreign press. Homolka divorced Bernardo in February 1994.
Murray and his colleague on the defense, Carolyn MacDonald, neither of them deeply experienced in criminal law, had meant to use the tapes to destroy Homolka on cross-examination. By the summer of 1994 he understood that holding them could itself be a crime, and he took advice from the Law Society of Upper Canada, which told him to seal them, give them to the trial judge, and withdraw from the case. On September 12, 1994, his own lawyer, Austin Cooper, told the trial judge, Justice Patrick LeSage, what had happened. Bernardo's new counsel, John Rosen, kept the tapes for about two weeks and then gave them to the prosecution. Murray later said they showed Homolka sexually assaulting four victims, having sex with a sex worker in Atlantic City and drugging an unconscious victim.
Bernardo's trial began in 1995, and the tapes were played in court, the jury seeing the pictures and the public only hearing the sound. Homolka spent days on the stand, often composed, describing herself in turn as a teenager in love, an abused wife and an unwilling witness to what her husband did. On September 1, 1995, the jury convicted Bernardo of two counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life and later declared a dangerous offender. The public anger that followed was aimed at the woman who had testified. The tapes, people said, would have convicted her of murder. The Ontario government asked a retired judge, Patrick Galligan, to review the plea. In 1996 he found the prosecutors' conduct "professional and responsible" and the agreement unassailable in law. Given what they knew in May 1993, he wrote, the Crown had no real alternative: dealing with an accomplice was the lesser evil compared with leaving a violent and dangerous offender unprosecuted. The six tapes of the assaults were destroyed in December 2001.
Homolka served her time first at the Prison for Women in Kingston, where she took correspondence courses in sociology through Queen's University and eventually earned a bachelor's degree in psychology, then from the summer of 1997 at the Joliette Institution in Quebec, and from 2001 at Ste-Anne-des-Plaines. After her testimony in 1995 her mother, Dorothy, suffered breakdowns each year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, severe enough to put her in the hospital for months at a time. In 1999 Homolka sued the government after a transfer to a Montreal halfway house was refused. She did not apply for parole. The National Parole Board, in any case, refused to release her at the two-thirds point of her sentence, finding she was still a risk to commit a violent offense, and noted that she had formed a secret relationship with another inmate, the convicted murderer Jean-Paul Gerbet, that appeared to have become sexual. Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem, a forensic psychologist for Correctional Service Canada, said that if she was dangerous it lay in the possibility of her joining another sexual sadist like Bernardo. One of the professionals who assessed her before prison wrote that she remained "something of a diagnostic mystery," with "a moral vacuity in her which is difficult, if not impossible, to explain." Graham Glancy, a forensic psychiatrist hired by Bernardo's defense, suggested she was sexually aroused by a partner's violence.
She walked out of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines on July 4, 2005, having served every day of the twelve years. After a two-day hearing in June, Judge Jean R. Beaulieu of Quebec had found she still posed a risk and imposed conditions on her under section 810.2 of the Criminal Code: she had to report her address and any change of name, stay away from the Mahaffy and French families, from Jane Doe and from Bernardo, and keep away from children under sixteen. On November 30, 2005, Quebec Superior Court Judge James Brunton lifted all of them for lack of evidence, and on December 6 the Quebec Court of Appeal agreed. She gave her first interview in French, to Radio-Canada, and said she had paid her debt to society legally but not emotionally or socially. She married Thierry Bordelais, the brother of her lawyer, Sylvie Bordelais, in 2005 by most accounts and 2007 by others, applied to change her name to Emily Chiara Tremblay and was refused in June 2006, had a son in 2007, left for the Antilles that December, had two more children and lived for a time in Guadeloupe, and was back in Quebec by 2014. In April 2016 she was reported to be living with her children in Châteauguay. When she became eligible to seek a pardon in 2010, Parliament rushed through a law restricting pardons for serious crimes in twelve days. In 2017 it emerged that she had been volunteering at her children's elementary school in Montreal. By 2020 she was reported to be living in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, without her husband or children.
Tammy Homolka was fifteen, Leslie Mahaffy fourteen and Kristen French fifteen. The woman convicted of manslaughter in two of their deaths was free at thirty-five.