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Paul Kenneth Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
Paul Kenneth Bernardo is a Canadian serial killer, known for the murders he committed with his wife Karla Homolka.
Bernardo graduated in 1987 from the University of Toronto at Scarborough. He joined the Toronto office of PricewaterhouseCoopers that September. A few months later, he met Homolka, and they started dating. Homolka would later say that he began abusing her immediately, calling her his "sex slave." They each encouraged each other's violent behavior: Homolka said she would not deny him anything, and urged (or at least allowed) him to brutalize her and, eventually, other women. Bernardo, meanwhile, demanded from her total submission, which included helping him commit murder and rape. They married in 1991.
Bernardo's trial for the murders of French and Mahaffy took place in 1995 , and included detailed testimony from Homolka and videotapes of the rapes.
The trial was subject to a publication ban to prevent the public from knowing details until after the trial. This led to many people driving to the United States and sharing newspaper reports from there. The trial was held in Toronto rather than St. Catharines, due to the inability to find an impartial jury in the city where the killings occurred
On September 1, 1995 , Bernardo was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison. Later, Bernardo was also declared a "Dangerous Offender", virtually ensuring that he will never be released on parole. Since his conviction, he has been held in solitary confinement at the Kingston Penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario. He occupies a very small cell 23 out of 24 hours a day and is allowed one hour of exercise in a small walled-in yard. He is kept apart from the other male prisoners to ensure his safety.
Bernardo is also suspected of other murders, including that of an acquaintance, Elizabeth Bain, for whose murder Robert Baltovich was convicted. The discovery of new evidence pointing to Bernardo as the murderer led to Baltovich's release from prison on bail in 2000 pending a retrial.
Further, Bernardo is believed to have committed rapes in Hawaii while on his honeymoon there; police investigation of his home revealed that he had kept newspaper clippings detailing rapes that had taken place at that time.
On February 21, 2006 , Bernardo admitted to ten more rapes in a letter to his lawyer.
Karla Homolka
George Walker and Murray Segal, a plea-bargain specialist for the attorney general, discussed a deal for Karla. Karla would get twelve years in prison for each of the two victims, but the sentences would be served concurrently. She would be eligible for parole in a little over three years with good behavior. The government even agreed to contact the parole board on Karla's behalf, pointing out to them the importance of her testimony against Paul. Segal would do what he
could to arrange for Karla to serve out her sentence in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison. The trial would be very brief and she would waive her right to a preliminary hearing.
In exchange for this leniency, Karla would agree to tell the absolute truth about her involvement in the crimes and everything she knew about them. Karla agreed unconditionally.
Early in May, 2000, Karla Homolka's bid to gain prison passes to attend a halfway house in Montreal received a boost when a taxpayer-funded women's group lent its support to her campaign. The Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, which operates on a federal subsidy, not only supported her application but also wished Homolka "every success" in her Federal Court bid to overturn a warden's denial of escorted passes to a CAEFS-operated Montreal halfway house. Hearing of the group's support, Tim Danson, lawyer for the parents of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, suggested CAEFS was either "terribly ill-informed" about Homolka or was "not qualified" to assess her case.
Danson had previously asked that Homolka not be released on parole in July 2001 but should instead go before the National Parole Board as a dangerous inmate who should be held for the full 12-year sentence.
Homolka sought Federal Court relief in 1999 after Joliette warden Marie-Andree Cyrenne refused her bid for a series of escorted passes to the Maison Therese- Casgrain, a Montreal halfway house operated by the Elizabeth Fry Society of Quebec. Homolka's original bid was bolstered by psychiatric and psychological reports from her 1993 trial, which portray Homolka as an abused victim of Bernardo. Psychological reports filed in response by Joliette prison were deemed confidential and could not be published.
Karla Homolka was released from a Canadian prison in July 2005, and the media held a "Karla watch" in anticipation. What they thought might happen is anyone's guess, but they were correct in believing that their audience wanted to follow every second of her first moments of freedom. Some hate her, some support her, and others are merely curious.
Karla is just one of a number of females who have participated in killing teams, so what makes her special? Some experts have called her a compliant victim of abuse, and yet there's something about her participation in certain acts and her manipulation of the system that makes that analysis less than satisfying. As a result, other experts have referred to her as a prime example of a female psychopath, which would account for her ability to dupe the system.
Just before Karla stepped out into society again, Judge Jean Beaulieu ruled that she still presented a risk to society (despite psychiatric reports that she did not), and conditions were set for her post-release behavior.
of the videos that they showed "direct evidence" that Bernardo was guilty of the abduction, unlawful confinement and aggravated sexual assault of French and Mahaffy.
"There was no evidence of any killing, but clearly these girls were killed and he is a party to homicide," Rosen said. While he said he saw no option but to hand the tapes over to prosecutors, he first tried to use them as leverage to plea-bargain Bernardo a second- degree murder conviction and a chance of parole after 15 years. He testified that he told high-ranking government prosecutors that a first-degree murder trial would be "dreadful" and "devastating" to the victims' families and "humiliating to the memory of their children." He said prosecutors had a good idea of what evidence had been passed to him by Murray and he warned them if "a picture's worth a thousand words then start multiplying it."
Several days later, Murray testified that he had felt a duty to Bernardo to retrieve, keep and use Bernardo's rape videos in support of a defense theory that Karla Homolka was a "black widow" killer. Murray described how his defense team had formulated the "black widow defense" for Bernardo in the French-Mahaffy sex slayings before they had seen the videos. He told the court that once he had seen the videos, he regarded Homolka as vastly different from the portrait of a coerced, manipulated and abused victim that she painted for prosecutors in her plea-bargaining, he said. All the videos, Murray said, were consistent with Bernardo's allegations that Homolka was "a liar" and very likely a killer.
Murray later described how he quit as Paul Bernardo's lawyer when Bernardo plotted to lie on the stand and told him to suppress the rape videos. Murray testified that Bernardo told him that he would testify that he had "no contact" at all with murdered schoolgirls Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy. Bernardo reasoned it was his word against Karla Homolka's. When Murray challenged Bernardo, saying he would not allow the perjury because the rape tapes showed he had been with the murdered girls, Bernardo said he would lie anyway. "He was telling me he was going to lie on the stand and he was asking me to be complicit ... asking me to hold back evidence that showed he was lying."
"I said you're not going to do it. You're not going to get up there and lie ... I'm not supporting perjury."
Later in April, as Murray's trial continued, a detailed transcription of the "rape videos" was read to the court. One of the most damning scenes is when the supposedly innocent Homolka is described as reaching for a dark green bottle known to contain the animal tranquillizer Halothane and, after soaking a rag with it, holds it to Jane Doe's mouth and nose. She then smiles, waves, blows kisses and licks her lips for the camera before sexually assaulting the girl and sitting naked on her.
This scene and others was detailed to the court in an attempt to strengthen Ken Murray's assertion that he kept Paul Bernardo's rape videos from prosecutors because they suggested Homolka was as likely as Bernardo to be a schoolgirl killer. Reading from a frame-by-frame and word-by-word police transcript of the chilling videos, Murray's lawyer, Austin Cooper, laid out details of the sinister rape of unconscious schoolgirl known only as Jane Doe, which had been previously shrouded in secrecy. Cooper's reading of that section of the video went far beyond the scant audio portions revealed at Bernardo's trial.
Cooper also read details of the couple's fatal drug rape of Tammy Homolka, Karla's 15- year-old sister on Christmas Eve, 1990, which she and Bernardo videotaped. Other footage, shot just two weeks after Tammy's murder, clearly shows Homolka pretending to be her dead sister while having sex with Bernardo.
The sections of the transcript depicting the rapes of French and Mahaffy was not read into the court record as they were protected by a publication ban which prohibited the reporting of any details but even without it, the details that were read cast a dark pall over court. The mothers of French and Mahaffy, who had previously been in attendance during the trial, left the courtroom as the reading began.
At one stage the gravity of what he was reading took its toll on Austin Cooper and he broke down in mid-sentence, asked for a break and was visibly choked with emotion as he left the courtroom. Superior Court Justice Patrick Gravely was also shaken by what he had heard and ordered an early lunch recess and an extended afternoon break.
Even case-hardened journalists who had previously seen or heard the tapes at Bernardo's trial five years before left the room or stopped taking notes to bury their heads in their hands.
In June, 2000, the Toronto Star reported that seven years after he first became involved in the Bernardo Homolka saga, Ken Murray was acquitted of obstruction of justice.
In an interview, after the court's decision, Murray suggested that, even though he was happy with the court's ruling, he may never be able to shake the stigma of being the man who attempted to protect Canada's most reviled sex killer, and inadvertently his then- wife, Karla Homolka. "There's a saying among prosecutors that, if you can't convict them, at least you can ruin their lives," Murray said, "but, unfortunately, that's what they did to me."
Paul Bernardo's former lawyer has been ordered to stand trial over the way he handled gruesome videotape evidence in the murder case. Ken Murray is accused of keeping the tapes from police for nearly 18 months. The videotapes show Bernardo and his wife, Karla Homolka, torturing and raping teenage girls. The victims, Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, were then killed. Police say Murray took the tapes from a hiding space above the bathroom ceiling in Bernardo's home in St. Catharines in 1993.
Investigators had searched the building for more than two months without finding the graphic material.
Murray maintains he had to wait before turning over the tapes because of a confidential, client-solicitor arrangement with Bernardo. After a preliminary hearing, a judge ruled Friday there is enough evidence to send Murray to trial on one count of obstructing justice.
