Paul Kenneth Bernardo was born in Scarborough, Ontario, on August 27, 1964. He took a commerce degree, worked as a trainee accountant at Price Waterhouse, was conventionally good-looking and by all accounts charming, and smuggled cigarettes across the border for money. He and Karla Homolka took the surname Teale, and he appears in some records as Paul Jason Teale. The press called him the Schoolgirl Killer.
Between May 1987 and May 1990 he raped at least fourteen women in Scarborough, attacking them from behind at night as they came home from bus stops. Toronto police called him the Scarborough Rapist. A composite sketch went out in 1990 and several people who knew Bernardo telephoned to say it looked exactly like him. He was interviewed in November 1990 and gave blood, hair and saliva samples.
Those samples sat in a queue at the Centre of Forensic Sciences for more than two years, in a backlog. They were not tested until February 1993. In that period he moved to St Catharines with Karla Homolka and the killings began.
In December 1990 Homolka's fifteen-year-old sister Tammy died after being drugged so that he could rape her. In June 1991 they abducted fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy, and in April 1992 fifteen-year-old Kristen French. Both were held for days, raped, filmed, and killed. Mahaffy's body was dismembered and set in concrete.
He was arrested in February 1993. He was convicted on September 1, 1995 of two counts of first degree murder, two of aggravated sexual assault, two of kidnapping, two of forcible confinement, and one of dismemberment, and was declared a dangerous offender. The tapes, which his own lawyer had removed from the house and held for seventeen months, were central and the lawyer was later disciplined for it.
The Campbell inquiry examined the failures: the untested DNA, the fact that Toronto and Niagara forces did not share what they had, and the plea deal with Homolka struck before the tapes were found. He has been denied parole repeatedly. In 2023 his transfer from maximum to medium security caused a national political row and a review, and he was subsequently returned to maximum.