Karla Homolka pleaded guilty in July 1993 to two counts of manslaughter in the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy, 14, and Kristen French, 15, two Ontario schoolgirls who were abducted, held and killed at the house she shared with her husband, Paul Bernardo, in Port Dalhousie, St. Catharines. She received two concurrent 12-year terms. In return she agreed to testify against Bernardo, who was convicted of the first-degree murders of both girls in 1995. Her agreement with the Crown also covered her part in the death of her younger sister, Tammy, who died on December 24, 1990, after the couple drugged and sexually assaulted her at the family home. She was never charged in Tammy's death.
The case is remembered in Canada for the agreement itself. Prosecutors made it in May 1993, when the only account of what had happened inside the house came from Homolka, who described herself as a battered wife who had acted out of fear. A week earlier, Bernardo's lawyer had removed six videotapes from the house that a 71-day police search had missed. When the tapes reached the police in September 1994 they showed Homolka as a participant, and the agreement became known as "a deal with the devil." A review by Patrick Galligan for Ontario's attorney general concluded in 1996 that the Crown had no alternative and that the agreement could not be undone. She served every day of her sentence and was released in July 2005.
Karla Homolka grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario, in the Niagara region, with her parents and two sisters, Lori and Tammy, according to Maclean's coverage of her 1995 testimony. She was a 17-year-old high-school student in October 1987 when she met Paul Bernardo, then 23. They met by chance at a hotel in Scarborough, in suburban Toronto, and spent the night together. About six weeks later she wrote that she trusted him completely and called him her "prince." They became engaged in December 1989.
She later worked at a veterinary clinic in the area. Her former lawyer, George Walker, said in 2005 that she had worked at the clinic he used for his own animals, which is how she came to his office in 1993.
By December 1990 Bernardo, 26, was engaged to Homolka, then 20, and living at her family's house in St. Catharines. Bernardo had lost his job at an accounting firm that year, according to CBC News. Unknown to anyone around them, he was also the man Toronto police were looking for as the "Scarborough Rapist." A series of rapes and attempted rapes of teenage girls and young women had begun in Scarborough in May 1987. Metropolitan Toronto Police formed a task force on November 17, 1988. In May 1990 a victim's description produced a composite sketch that resembled Bernardo; he was questioned twice, was not treated as a likely suspect, and in November 1990 gave samples for DNA testing as a matter of routine. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives the count as up to 24 attacks.
Tammy Lyn Homolka was 15, the youngest of the three sisters. CBC News dates a first drugging and sexual assault of Tammy by the couple to July 1990. At Bernardo's trial his lawyer put it to Homolka that she had drugged her sister twice, not once; she denied the earlier incident, telling him he was "dead wrong."
On December 23, 1990, after a Christmas party at the family home, Homolka and Bernardo drugged Tammy again. Homolka testified that she had obtained a prescription for sleeping pills and had taken halothane, an anesthetic, from the veterinary clinic where she worked. The couple sexually assaulted Tammy, and Homolka recorded it, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. Early on December 24 Tammy stopped breathing. The couple called 911, and she was pronounced dead at St. Catharines General Hospital. She had choked on her own vomit.
Niagara Regional Police questioned the couple about a burn mark on Tammy's face and accepted Bernardo's explanation. Doctors concluded she had choked after drinking heavily, and her death was not treated as a crime. The Ontario review of the police investigation later described it as "a secret homicide thought by the coroner and the police to be a death from natural causes." Her body was later exhumed for further investigation, Newsweek reported in 1993.
At Bernardo's trial Homolka said he had coerced her into taking part and then used the secret of how Tammy died to blackmail her into staying with him. His lawyer argued the opposite: that she had become jealous of her sister and that Tammy's death barely affected her.
In mid-January 1991 her parents asked Bernardo to leave their home. He left with Karla, and on February 1, 1991, the couple moved into a rented bungalow in Port Dalhousie, a lakeside part of St. Catharines. Her parents asked her to postpone the June wedding by a year because of the cost of Tammy's funeral, Maclean's reported; the couple went ahead.
Leslie Mahaffy was 14 and lived with her family in Burlington, Ontario, between Hamilton and Toronto. Her brother Ryan, who was seven when she died, told a parole hearing in 2024 that Bernardo had taken his "mentor and best friend." Her parents, Dan and Debbie Mahaffy, have spoken for her at every stage of the case since.
She was abducted in Burlington on June 15, 1991, the day her parents reported her missing, and taken to the house in Port Dalhousie. Homolka testified in 1995 that she stayed upstairs for much of that day, was drawn into the assault in the evening, and did nothing to stop it when Bernardo decided Leslie had to die because she could identify him. She testified that she helped dispose of Leslie's remains.
On June 29, 1991, boaters and fishermen found Leslie's remains in Lake Gibson, south of St. Catharines. That was the day Homolka and Bernardo were married in Niagara-on-the-Lake, according to Newsweek and The Canadian Encyclopedia; the couple were on their honeymoon in Hawaii when the remains were identified. Police did not link her death to the Scarborough attacks or to anyone else at the time.
Each of them later blamed the other for Leslie's death. Homolka testified that Bernardo strangled her with an electrical cord. Bernardo's lawyer, John Rosen, put it to her at trial that she had suffocated Leslie herself while Bernardo was elsewhere in the house. "What you are putting to me is a lie," she replied. The jury convicted Bernardo of Leslie's first-degree murder; Homolka's plea was to manslaughter.
Kristen French was 15 and lived in St. Catharines. Each day she walked past Grace Lutheran Church on her way to and from school. On the afternoon of April 16, 1992, shortly before the Easter weekend, she was abducted from the church parking lot. Her parents, Doug and Donna French, reported her missing that day. A witness had seen a struggle and two people forcing a girl into a cream-colored car, which police first believed was a Camaro; Bernardo drove a gold Nissan. Police found one of her shoes and a torn piece of a map of Scarborough in the lot.
She was held at the house in Port Dalhousie for three days. Homolka testified that Bernardo strangled her on the morning of April 19, 1992. Rosen's version at trial was that Bernardo had wanted to keep Kristen captive, that Homolka argued she had to die, and that when Kristen tried to escape while Bernardo was out, Homolka struck her. Homolka denied it.
On April 30, 1992, Kristen's body was found in a ditch on a rural road in north Burlington. In May, Leslie Mahaffy's remains were exhumed, and what investigators found led them to connect the two deaths. A special task force was formed to investigate what were now called the schoolgirl murders. On May 12, 1992, police interviewed Bernardo after a tip about his violent tendencies and dismissed him as a prime suspect.
Her parents later led the campaign to build a center in Niagara where abused children are interviewed by police and other authorities in one child-friendly place, ideally only once. On its sixth anniversary in September 2014 it was renamed the Kristen French Child Advocacy Centre. "When you lose a child and that child no longer has an identity, a parent fears they won't be remembered," Donna French said at the ceremony. Doug French called the renaming "a wonderful tribute to her."
Homolka also took part in the sexual assault of another teenage girl in 1991, a girl who survived. In court she was known only as Jane Doe. Homolka admitted her part in an August 1991 assault on her, according to Maclean's, but did not disclose it until October 1993. The Crown later extended her agreement to cover that incident too.
At Bernardo's trial Rosen also suggested that in January 1991, while Homolka's parents were away, Bernardo had assaulted another teenage girl in Homolka's bedroom while she watched. Homolka had described the episode differently. CBC News lists a rape of a hitchhiker in the Homolka home in January 1991 among Bernardo's crimes.
The breakup came first. On January 6, 1993, Bernardo beat Homolka with a flashlight. She was taken to hospital, and he was charged with assault with a weapon and released on bail. She never returned to the house. Maclean's reported that her parents removed her from it on January 5, 1993; the dates differ by a day between the two sources.
The DNA sample Bernardo had given in November 1990 had not been tested. The Ontario review of the investigation found it "lay untested at the Centre of Forensic Sciences for more than two years." On February 1, 1993, forensic scientists matched his DNA to some of the Scarborough rapes. That linked him to the rapes but not to the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Police put him under surveillance and tapped his phone.
Homolka hired a lawyer, George Walker of Niagara Falls, on February 11, 1993. On February 17, 1993, Bernardo was arrested for the Scarborough rapes and the two murders. Homolka was interviewed by police over four days. She blamed Bernardo for Tammy's death and described herself as a battered wife who had been forced to take part. In March 1993, while in hospital for a psychiatric assessment, she wrote letters to her parents and to her sister Lori confessing her role in Tammy's death.
Police searched the house in Port Dalhousie for 71 days. They did not find the videotapes.
In the words of a later federal Justice Department paper, the authorities in early 1993 had no admissible evidence tying Bernardo to the killings, and without Homolka's cooperation a prosecution for the murders was unlikely. Police and prosecutors saw her as both a victim of his abuse and an accomplice.
Through Walker she first sought blanket immunity in February 1993. The Ontario attorney general refused immunity but agreed to consider a reduced sentence. The proposal moved to guilty pleas to two counts of manslaughter for 10 years. The final agreement, reached in mid-May 1993 after negotiations between Walker and senior Crown officials in Toronto, set 12 years. It was signed by Murray Segal, director of the Crown's criminal law office, and finalized on May 14, 1993.
Its terms, as Maclean's reported them in 1995, required her to give "a full, complete and truthful account" of the deaths of Kristen French, Leslie Mahaffy and Tammy Homolka and of any other crimes she had taken part in. The Crown could lay further charges if she lied or committed perjury, and the agreement could be cancelled if it turned out she had actually killed Kristen or Leslie. She was barred from giving public interviews or profiting from the three deaths. If a judge refused to accept the agreement, the Crown could lay whatever charges it thought appropriate.
How the agreement dealt with Tammy's death is stated in slightly different ways by different sources. Maclean's wrote in 1995 that the deal shielded her from prosecution for Tammy's death and that the 12-year term was "apparently to reflect her involvement" in it. Walker said in 2005 that Tammy's death was treated as an aggravating factor in sentencing and was covered by the agreement. The Globe and Mail's justice reporter, Kirk Makin, wrote in 2005 that the agreement set 10 years for the two manslaughter counts and that she received a further two years for Tammy's death. All agree that she was never charged with any offense in her sister's death.
Walker and the Crown knew that tapes existed before the agreement was signed, Walker said. The federal Justice Department paper, summarizing the Galligan review, says Homolka had told the authorities from the start that the tapes existed, though not where they were.
Homolka was charged on May 18, 1993, with two counts of manslaughter and freed on bail. Her case was heard before Justice Francis Kovacs of the Ontario Court, General Division, in St. Catharines, beginning in late June. On July 6, 1993, she was convicted on her guilty pleas and sentenced to two concurrent terms of 12 years. A Canadian Press photograph from that day shows her leaving the St. Catharines courthouse in handcuffs.
Justice Kovacs banned publication of most of the evidence presented at the hearing and excluded foreign journalists from the courtroom. Canadian reporters could attend and hear the evidence but could not publish most of it until Bernardo, who by then was using the surname Teale, had been tried. The judge said he was trying to balance the freedom of the press against Bernardo's right to a fair trial. Some of the victims' relatives supported the ban. Leslie Mahaffy's mother asked how many times the family had to relive her daughter's death.
The ban applied only in Canada. American outlets reported what they could learn. The Washington Post ran a detailed story on November 23, 1993, which the Detroit Free Press and the Buffalo News picked up. Shipments of the Buffalo News and the New York Times were reportedly stopped on the Peace Bridge at Niagara Falls; travelers could bring in one copy, and extra copies were confiscated. Canadian distributors refused to sell papers carrying the story. Details also spread through computer bulletin boards.
The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Sun and the CBC challenged the order, with arguments set before the Ontario Court of Appeal in late January 1994. Critics said the ban kept Canadians from judging whether her sentence was right. Bernardo's lawyers argued it hurt him, because it let Homolka be portrayed only as his victim. Newsweek, covering the case from New York in December 1993, reported that she would be eligible for parole in four years and took that as a sign she had agreed to testify.
Homolka and Bernardo divorced on February 25, 1994.
On May 6, 1993, on Bernardo's instructions, his lawyer Ken Murray and Murray's associate Carolyn MacDonald went into the house in Port Dalhousie and removed six eight-millimeter videotapes from their hiding place. The tapes recorded the assault on Tammy Homolka and the abuse of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, and they showed Homolka as a participant rather than a coerced witness. Murray later said Bernardo told him not to watch them and gave permission only two days after Homolka's agreement was made.
Murray kept the tapes until he withdrew as Bernardo's lawyer in September 1994. Accounts of the handover differ: Maclean's reported that he gave them to his successor, John Rosen, who turned them over to prosecutors, while a Globe and Mail report says that on the advice of the Law Society of Upper Canada, Murray and his own lawyer, Austin Cooper, gave them to a judge. Police received them on September 22, 1994. Maclean's described the delay as 16 months and the court that later tried Murray as 17 months.
The federal Justice Department paper states that if the authorities had had the tapes on May 14, 1993, "the prosecutor would never have entered into the resolution agreement with Homolka." Maclean's reported in 1997 that a 1996 provincial inquiry had reached the same conclusion. By then the agreement had been made, and she had been sentenced under it.
Jury selection in Bernardo's trial began in Toronto on May 1, 1995, before Justice Patrick LeSage, and the Crown opened its case on May 18. The jury had eight men and four women. The Crown showed them about three and a half hours of the videotapes. Spectators in the courtroom were allowed to hear the sound but not see the pictures, a ruling the victims' families objected to.
Homolka was the Crown's main witness. She testified from June 19, 1995, for 17 court days in all, questioned first by Crown attorney Ray Houlahan. She described a relationship that began with lavish attention and turned into sexual, physical and emotional abuse. She said she was afraid of Bernardo, that he beat and degraded her, and that he held the secret of Tammy's death over her. Asked why she had not stopped him when he brought another girl to the house, she said he "had something big held over my head." Of prison, she said: "I have a lot more freedom in prison than I ever had with him." Justice LeSage told the jury that her credibility was an issue, since witnesses in her position often play down their own roles.
Rosen, 50, cross-examined her for seven days in July 1995. He read dozens of love notes she had written to Bernardo, showed photographs of a smiling couple and argued that she had pursued him, wanted to marry him, and went along with his plans to preserve what he called a "fairy-tale marriage." He read from a May 1992 letter in which she told a friend she was looking forward to having a baby with Bernardo. He said she had stayed devoted to him until January 1993. He argued that she was far more involved than she admitted, that she had caused Leslie's death, and that Kristen had died either from blows Homolka struck or by accidental strangulation. The exchanges were heated, and Justice LeSage several times told Rosen to let her answer.
She held to her account. Rosen warned that the agreement could be reopened, and that she could face kidnapping, unlawful confinement or sexual assault charges, if new evidence emerged.
On September 1, 1995, after a four-month trial, the jury found Bernardo guilty on all nine counts: two counts of first-degree murder, plus kidnapping, forcible confinement, aggravated sexual assault and offering an indignity to a human body. He was sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years. In October 1995 the Crown applied in St. Catharines to have him declared a dangerous offender, and he was later so designated, which means indefinite detention. At that point he still faced 33 other charges, including 14 Scarborough rapes, two rapes in the Niagara region and the death of Tammy Homolka, Maclean's reported. In 2000 the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada rejected his appeals of the murder convictions.
The Canadian Press has reported, in 2021 and 2024, that Bernardo was convicted of manslaughter in Tammy's death.
The anger after the verdict turned on the woman who had testified. The tapes, critics said, showed that her role deserved far more than 12 years. By October 1995 a petition with more than 300,000 names had been delivered to the Ontario legislature asking for a review of the agreement, and many people were urging Premier Mike Harris to call an inquiry.
The Ontario attorney general ordered an inquiry into the agreement, conducted by the Honourable Patrick T. Galligan. His Report to the Attorney General of Ontario on Certain Matters Relating to Karla Homolka is dated March 15, 1996. The federal Department of Justice summarized its findings in two later papers.
Galligan found that the conduct of counsel on both sides was professional and responsible and that the process surrounding the agreement was "unassailable." He concluded that the Crown had "no alternative" but to negotiate with an accomplice: dealing with her was the lesser of two evils, because the Crown has a duty to prosecute murderers. A 2004 Justice Department study put his conclusion as the Crown having had "absolutely no choice" if it wanted to convict Bernardo, given what it knew at the time. He judged that a range of 10 to 15 years was the appropriate sanction, so 12 years was adequate.
On whether she could now be charged with murder, he found it was not possible. Doing so would have broken the agreement, and the Criminal Code itself stood in the way: section 610(2) provides that a conviction for manslaughter bars a later indictment for the same homicide charged as murder. He found that Homolka had made "full, complete and truthful disclosure" of her crimes and had kept her side of the agreement. Prosecutors repudiate agreements only in very rare cases, he said, and this was not one; setting the agreement aside so long afterward would be more likely to bring the administration of justice into disrepute than to uphold it. Walker cited the report in 2005 as proof the agreement was fair.
A separate review, by Justice Archie Campbell, examined the police investigation. The Bernardo Investigation Review was completed in June 1996. A 1996 government inquiry found that the police investigation had been hampered by errors and rivalries between agencies, and concluded that some of Bernardo's crimes might have been prevented if his DNA sample had been processed sooner, according to CBC News and The Canadian Encyclopedia. The review's text describes Homolka as the woman "who helped Bernardo kill her sister Tammy," and Tammy's death as one the coroner and police had taken for natural causes.
In April 1996 a judge ordered the tapes destroyed once they were no longer needed for legal purposes. They were destroyed in December 2001, CBC News reported.
In 1997 the Ontario Provincial Police charged Ken Murray and Carolyn MacDonald with obstructing justice and possession of child pornography, and Murray alone with making obscene material, a charge apparently tied to copying the tapes. Murray said he had been bound by lawyer-client confidentiality and called the police focus on him an attempt to find a scapegoat for the agreement. At his trial, his lawyer said he had kept the tapes to confront Homolka when she testified, because they went to the core of her credibility.
On June 13, 2000, Justice Patrick Gravely of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice found Murray not guilty of attempting to obstruct justice. The court held that Murray's testimony raised a reasonable doubt about whether he had intended to obstruct justice.
Homolka served her sentence first at the Prison for Women in Kingston, where police continued to question and prepare her for Bernardo's trial. In the summer of 1997 she was transferred to Joliette Institution in Quebec, and later to Ste-Anne-des-Plaines. She completed a psychology degree in prison.
She never applied for parole, which the agreement had said the Crown would not oppose if she behaved well. In August 1999 she applied for a six-month escorted temporary absence and was turned down. In January 2001 Correctional Service Canada recommended that she be held past her statutory release date. On March 8, 2001, the National Parole Board agreed, finding her a risk to commit an offense causing death or serious harm before her sentence expired. The detention was upheld at each annual review. A 2003 board assessment recorded a relationship with a male inmate at Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, a man serving time for killing his former girlfriend, which, Maclean's reported, "rapidly became sexual." The relationship began in January 2002, The Globe and Mail reported. The board's final ruling, on December 16, 2004, kept her in prison until her full term ended in July 2005.
In 2004, after a journalist published a book in Quebec drawing partly on his correspondence with her, Ontario's attorney general, David Young, asked Niagara Regional Police to look into whether she had broken the agreement's ban on taking part in publications about the case. Tim Danson, lawyer for the French and Mahaffy families, argued she had. No finding of a breach was reported.
Because she was held to the end of her sentence, she would leave prison with no parole conditions at all. Ontario's attorney general, Michael Bryant, said the province would use every legal avenue. The tool chosen was section 810 of the Criminal Code, a peace-bond provision that lets a judge impose conditions on someone a court has reasonable grounds to fear will injure another person. An order would last 12 months, could be renewed, and a breach could bring up to two years in prison. Walker called the application grandstanding. "This is no longer about monitoring," he said. "This is punishment."
In June 2005, Quebec judge Jean Beaulieu heard the application over two days, her first public appearance in a decade. Constable Brian Noble of the Niagara Regional Police described the crimes and cited correctional and psychiatric records to argue that she remained a threat. A defense psychiatrist, Louis Morissette, testified that she had problems with self-esteem but was not a psychopath and was at no greater risk of reoffending than other inmates. Her lawyer argued that restrictions would violate her rights and that she had changed. On the second day, a Friday, in a ruling that took about 10 minutes, Judge Beaulieu found the Crown's fears valid and adopted almost all of its roughly dozen proposed conditions for one year.
She was to tell authorities where she lived and with whom, attend therapy, abstain from drugs, have no contact with anyone under 16, give police 96 hours' notice before leaving Quebec, provide a DNA sample, and have no contact with Bernardo, the French and Mahaffy families, or anyone with a criminal record. Danson said the families felt "enormous relief." Bryant said Ontario and Quebec were pleased that the justice system had acted to prevent harm.
Homolka was released on July 4, 2005, at 35, having served the full 12 years.
That day she gave a television interview in French to Joyce Napier of Radio-Canada; CBC published an English translation. Asked whether she had paid her debt to society, she answered: "Legally yes. Emotionally and socially no." She said she was a private person who did not want to be hounded, and that she did not want people to think she was dangerous. Asked whether she was, she said, "Not at all. Not at all." She said she had been under Bernardo's influence, that her family had never rejected her, and that "I will always be in an internal prison."
Homolka challenged the conditions. Justice James Brunton of the Quebec Superior Court ruled that the lower court had had insufficient evidence that she remained a threat, and he lifted all the restrictions, 14 in all, UPI reported on December 1, 2005. She could again contact anyone, including Bernardo, the victims' families and people with criminal records, and could stop the therapy. Quebec's justice minister, Yvon Marcoux, announced an appeal two days later, saying the judge had misinterpreted the test for whether she presented an imminent and serious danger, and asked the Quebec Court of Appeal to restore the conditions while the appeal was heard. Brunton's decision stayed in effect in the meantime, and the families sought standing to take part. Doug French said: "Let's hope they work this time." CBC News records that authorities had found she did not breach the conditions while they were in force. No later ruling restoring them was reported; The Canadian Encyclopedia says only that the conditions were overturned months after they were imposed.
Under the law of the time, Homolka would become eligible to apply for a pardon in July 2010. A report filed in a Quebec court in 2005 said she had told a Correctional Service psychologist in 2001 that she hoped one day to receive one. In the spring of 2010 the federal government announced it would tighten the rules. Parliament split its broader bill and passed the urgent part, Bill C-23A, the Limiting Pardons for Serious Crimes Act, which went through every stage in the House of Commons on June 17, 2010, passed the Senate on June 28 and received royal assent on June 29, 2010. CBC News described it as a bill to stop offenders such as Homolka from applying for pardons. No application by her was reported.
She later remarried and had children, The Canadian Press reported. She has not been reported to have been charged with any offense since her release.
Bernardo remains in prison as a designated dangerous offender. The Parole Board of Canada denied him day and full parole in October 2018, June 2021 and November 2024. At the 2021 hearing he said of Homolka, "I believe I ruined her life," and added that she was as guilty as he was. In 2023 he was moved from a maximum-security Ontario prison to La Macaza Institution, a medium-security prison in Quebec, a transfer that caused public outcry. In 2024 he told the board he had become a sexual sadist, and the board cited his risk of sexual reoffending.
Donna and Doug French and Dan and Debbie Mahaffy have taken part in every stage of the case, represented by Tim Danson. In October 1995 they spoke publicly for the first time since the trial, on CBC and CTV. "A very big part of our lives is missing and we can't get it back," Donna French said. They objected to letting spectators hear the tapes, pressed for no one ever to have access to them again, objected to the lifting of Homolka's conditions, and have opposed every one of Bernardo's parole applications. "Time doesn't heal the pain; the pain is a life sentence," the Frenches told the board in 2021. In 2024 Debbie Mahaffy said Bernardo remained the greatest destruction of her peace and hope, and Donna French said she had not healed.
Karla Homolka completed her sentence in July 2005. The conditions placed on her that June were lifted later that year, and no later court order or criminal charge against her had been reported by October 21, 2026.
Proven by final judgment: her guilty pleas to manslaughter, two counts, in the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French (July 6, 1993); Bernardo's convictions for the first-degree murders of both girls (September 1, 1995).
Admitted but never charged: her part in Tammy Homolka's death, which the agreement covered, and in the assault on the surviving girl known as Jane Doe, to which it was extended.
Which of the two caused each death was contested at Bernardo's trial. Homolka testified that Bernardo strangled both girls. Bernardo's defense said she killed them. The jury convicted Bernardo of first-degree murder; Homolka's pleas were to manslaughter, and under section 610(2) of the Criminal Code she cannot now be tried for murder in those deaths.
Her account of being an abused and coerced partner was accepted by the Crown in 1993, questioned when the tapes appeared, and remains disputed. The 2005 court in Quebec heard competing psychiatric evidence; the families have said they never accepted it.
Details that vary between sources: whether her trial began on June 24 or June 28, 1993 (Maclean's gives June 24; the date the case was first heard was not confirmed in court records); whether she was removed from the house on January 5 (Maclean's) or left after the beating of January 6, 1993 (The Canadian Encyclopedia); whether the agreement was dated February 24, 1993 (one Globe and Mail report) or finalized May 14, 1993 (Justice Canada and Maclean's); how long Murray held the tapes (16 or 17 months); whether Tammy was 14 (Newsweek, 1993) or 15 (all other sources); and whether Bernardo was later convicted of manslaughter in Tammy's death (The Canadian Press, 2021 and 2024; not confirmed in any court record).
May 1987: the first of the Scarborough rapes.
October 1987: Karla Homolka, 17, meets Paul Bernardo, 23.
December 1989: they become engaged.
July 1990: according to Bernardo's account, the couple drug Tammy for the first time; Homolka denies it.
November 1990: Bernardo gives DNA samples in the Scarborough investigation; they go untested for more than two years.
December 23 to 24, 1990: Tammy Homolka, 15, dies after being drugged and sexually assaulted at the family home; her death is not treated as a crime.
February 1, 1991: the couple move into a rented house in Port Dalhousie.
June 15, 1991: Leslie Mahaffy, 14, is abducted in Burlington.
June 29, 1991: Leslie's remains are found in Lake Gibson; Homolka and Bernardo marry in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
August 1991: the assault on the girl known as Jane Doe, who survives.
April 16, 1992: Kristen French, 15, is abducted from the Grace Lutheran Church parking lot in St. Catharines.
April 19, 1992: Kristen dies at the house in Port Dalhousie.
April 30, 1992: her body is found in north Burlington.
January 6, 1993: Bernardo beats Homolka; she leaves him.
February 1, 1993: his DNA is matched to Scarborough rapes.
February 11, 1993: Homolka hires George Walker.
February 17, 1993: Bernardo is arrested; a 71-day search of the house follows.
March 1993: Homolka writes to her family confessing her role in Tammy's death.
May 6, 1993: Ken Murray removes six videotapes from the house.
May 14, 1993: Homolka's resolution agreement is finalized.
May 18, 1993: she is charged with two counts of manslaughter.
July 6, 1993: convicted on her guilty pleas and sentenced to concurrent 12-year terms by Justice Francis Kovacs, who bans publication of most of the evidence.
October 1993: she discloses the assault on Jane Doe.
February 25, 1994: Homolka and Bernardo divorce.
September 22, 1994: police receive the tapes.
May 1 to September 1, 1995: Bernardo's trial in Toronto; Homolka testifies from June 19.
September 1, 1995: Bernardo convicted on all nine counts, including two counts of first-degree murder.
March 15, 1996: Galligan report upholds the agreement.
June 1996: Campbell's Bernardo Investigation Review.
1997: Murray and MacDonald are charged.
Summer 1997: Homolka is moved to Joliette Institution, Quebec.
June 13, 2000: Murray is acquitted.
March 8, 2001: the National Parole Board orders her held until her sentence expires.
December 2001: the tapes are destroyed.
December 16, 2004: the board's final detention ruling.
June 2005: Judge Jean Beaulieu imposes section 810 conditions.
July 4, 2005: Homolka is released; Radio-Canada interview.
Late 2005: Justice James Brunton lifts the conditions (reported December 1, 2005); Quebec appeals.
June 29, 2010: the Limiting Pardons for Serious Crimes Act receives royal assent.
September 2014: the Niagara child advocacy center is renamed for Kristen French.
May to June 2017: reports of her volunteering at a school lead the school's operator to bar volunteers with criminal records.
October 2018, June 2021, November 2024: Bernardo is denied parole.
October 21, 2026: no later development found.