Two killers from Hell (part 2)
In part 1, I previously told my readers about Paul Bernardo and Karla
Homolka who are two Canadian serial killers. I described their backgrounds;
Bernardo’s many rapes, the death of Homolka’s youngest sister and the murder of
one of the duo’s first victim. In this article I will describe the death of
their second victim and the police investigation, their arrests, trials,
sentences and the aftermath,
After having got away with the murder of
14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy this time
they tried a different technique. On the afternoon of April 16th,
1992, Bernardo and Homolka were driving through St. Catharines looking for
potential victims. It was after school hours on the day before Good Friday. Students were
still going home but by and large the streets were empty. As they passed Holy Cross Secondary School, a main Catholic
high school in the city's north end, they spotted Kristen French, a 15-year-old
student, walking briskly to her nearby home. The couple pulled into the parking
lot of nearby Grace Lutheran Church and Homolka got out of the car, map in
hand, pretending to need assistance.
As
French looked at the map, Bernardo attacked from behind, brandishing a knife
and forcing her into the front seat of their car. From her back seat, Homolka
controlled the girl by pulling down her hair.
Kristen took the
same route home every day, taking about 15 minutes to get home in order to
attend to her dog's needs. Soon after she should have arrived, her parents
became convinced that she had met with foul play and notified the police.
Within 24 hours, Niagara Regional Police had assembled a team and searched the
area along her route and found several witnesses who had seen the abduction
from different locations, thus giving police a fairly clear picture. In
addition, one of French's shoes, recovered from the parking lot, underscored
the seriousness of the abduction.
Over the three days
of Easter weekend, Bernardo and Homolka
videotaped themselves as they tortured, raped and sodomized Kristen French,
forcing her to drink large amounts of alcohol and to behave in a submissive
manner towards Bernardo. At Bernardo's trial, Crown prosecutor Ray Houlahan
said that Bernardo always intended to kill her because she was never
blindfolded and was capable of identifying her captors.
The following day,
the couple murdered French before going to the Homolkas' for Easter dinner.
Homolka testified at her trial that Bernardo had strangled French for exactly
seven minutes while she watched. Bernardo said Homolka beat her with a rubber
mallet because she had tried to escape and that French ended up being strangled
on a noose tied around her neck secured to a hope chest. Immediately
thereafter, Homolka went to fix her hair.
French's
nude body was found in a ditch on April 30, 1992 in Burlington, approximately
45 minutes from St. Catharines, and a short distance from the cemetery where
Leslie Mahaffy is buried. She had been washed and her hair had been cut off. It
had been thought that the hair was removed as a trophy, but Homolka testified
that the hair had been cut to impede identification. That doesn’t make any
sense at all.
On the weekend of
January 12, 1991, according to author Stephen Williams, Bernardo abducted a
girl, took her to their house and raped her while Homolka watched; afterward he
dropped her off on a deserted road near Lake Gibson. Bernardo and Homolka
referred to her simply as "January girl".
At
about 5:30 a.m. on April 6th, 1991, Bernardo abducted a
14-year-old who was warming up for her duties as coxswain on one of the local
rowing teams. The girl was distracted by a blonde woman (Homolka) who waved at
her from her car, enabling Bernardo to drag her into the shrubbery near the
rowing club. There he sexually assaulted her, then forced her to remove all her
clothes and wait five minutes, during which he disappeared.
On March 29,
1992, Bernardo stalked and videotaped two sisters from his car and followed
them to their parents' house. The sisters incorrectly recorded his licence
plate number. One sister reported the incident to Niagara Regional Police on
March 31, 1992 and was given an incident number should further information
develop. With Kristen French under Homolka's guard on April 18, 1992, Bernardo
went out to buy dinner and rent a movie. He was spotted by one of the sisters,
who attempted to track him to his house. Despite losing him, she got a better
description of his licence plate and car, which she reported to police. This
information, however, was mishandled by police and slipped into the "black
hole" to which Judge Archie Campbell would refer in the Campbell Report of
1996, an inquiry into police mishandling of evidence in the case.
Homolka
and Bernardo had been questioned by police several times in connection
with the Scarborough Rapist investigation, Tammy
Lyn Homolka's death, and about Bernardo's stalking of other women. The
questioning was before the death of Kristen French. The officer filed a report,
and on the 12th of May 1992, an Niagara
Regional Police Service sergeant and a constable
interviewed Bernardo briefly. The officers decided that he was an unlikely
suspect, although Bernardo admitted having been questioned in connection with
the Scarborough rapes. Three days later,
the Green Ribbon Task Force was
created to investigate the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.
Meanwhile
the couple applied to have their names changed legally from Bernardo and
Homolka to Teale, which Bernardo had taken from the villain of the 1988 movie Criminal Law—a serial killer. At the end of
May, John Motile, an acquaintance of Smirnis and Bernardo, also reported
Bernardo as a possible murder suspect. In December 1992, the Centre of Forensic
Sciences finally began testing DNA samples provided by
Bernardo two years earlier.
The Bernardo’s relationship was beginning to
falter. On 27th of December 1992, Bernardo severely beat
Homolka with a flashlight on her limbs, head and face. Claiming that she had
been in an automobile accident, the severely bruised Homolka returned to work
on the 4th of January 1993.
Her skeptical co-workers called Homolka's parents, who assumed they were
'rescuing' her the following day by physically removing her from the house.
Homolka went back in, frantically searching for something. Her parents took her
to the St. Catharines General Hospital, where her injuries were documented. The E.R. said that her injuries "were the worst wife-beating case they
had ever seen. ever seen. She gave a statement to the Niagara Regional
Police claiming she had been a battered spouse and filed charges against
Bernardo. He was arrested but later released on his own recognizance. A friend
who found Bernardo's suicide note intervened.
Homolka moved in with relatives in Brampton in January 1993.
On February 1st, 1993 the Toronto police
discovered from a twenty-six-month-old sample that Bernardo was the Scarborough
Rapist. After questioning Homolka, she admitted everything (about the rapes in
Scarborough) to her lawyer and sought full protection for her cooperation.
The
Metro Toronto Sexual Assault Squad investigators interviewed Homolka on the 9th
of February 1993. Despite telling her their suspicions about Bernardo, Homolka
concentrated on his abuse of her. Later that night she told her aunt and uncle
that her husband was the Scarborough Rapist, that they were involved in the
rapes and murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, and that the rapes of
those two victims were recorded on video tape.
On
the 11th of February 1993, Homolka met with Niagara Falls lawyer
George Walker who then sought full immunity from St Catharines'
Crown Attorney Ray Houlahan in exchange for her cooperation. Homolka was placed
under 24-hour surveillance.
The next day, George Walker met
with Murray Segal, Director of the Crown Criminal Law Office. Walker told Segal
of videotapes of the rapes and Segal advised Walker that, considering Homolka's
involvement in the crimes, full immunity was not a possibility.
The
Metro Sexual Assault Squad and the Green Ribbon Task Force detectives jointly
arrested Bernardo on numerous charges on 17th of February 1993, and
obtained search warrants to search the duo’s
home in Port Dalhousie. Because
Bernardo's link to the murders was weak, the warrant contained some
limitations. No evidence that was not expected and documented in the warrant
was permitted to be removed from the premises. All video tapes the police found
had to be viewed in the house. Damage to the house had to be kept to a minimum;
police could not tear down walls looking for the videotapes. The search of the
house, including updated warrants, lasted 71 days and the only tape found by
the police had a short segment depicting Homolka performing oral sex on Jane Doe.
On
5 May 1993, Walker was informed that the government was offering Homolka a
12-year sentence plea bargain that she had one
week to accept. If she declined, the government would charge her with two
counts of first degree murder, one count of second
degree murder and other crimes.
Walker accepted the offer and Homolka later wisely agreed to it.
Had
she refused the offer, she would be sentence to 25 years in prison before she
could apply for parole and it would be possible that she would never be
released from prison.
On
the 14th of May 1993, the plea agreement between Homolka and the
Crown was finalized, and she began giving her induced statements to police
investigators about Bernardo’s rape, torture and murder of the two victims
killed in their home. She never said anything about her role in the sexual
abuse of the two victims. Citing the need to protect Bernardo's right to a fair trial, a publication ban
was imposed on Homolka's preliminary inquiry.
Keep in mind that the police didn’t know at that
time that there was a hidden video tape in the home that showed that she also
sexually abused the two victims before they were murdered.
Public
access to the Internet effectively nullified the court's order as did proximity
to the American border, since a publication ban by an Ontario Court cannot
apply in New York, Michigan, or anywhere else outside of Ontario. That is how I
learned of what had really happened to the two victims before the trial even
began.
Bernardo's
trial for the murders of French and Mahaffy took place in 1995, and included
detailed testimony from Homolka The hidden video tape hadn’t been found during
his trial.
During
the trial, Bernardo claimed the deaths were accidental, and later claimed that
his wife was the actual killer. On September 1, 1995, Bernardo was convicted of
a number of offences, including the two first-degree murders and two aggravated
sexual assaults, and sentenced to life in prison. However, life in prison for
first degree murder means that the prisoner can apply for parole in 25 years.
It doesn’t mean he will get it however. He was also charged as a ‘Dangerous Offender’, making it
unlikely that he will ever be released from prisoner. He is serving his
sentence in the Bath Penitentiary which is a highly secure prison. He is in the
protective inmates unit.
In
return for a plea bargain (12 years in prison
for manslaughter), Homolka testified
against Bernardo in his murder trial.
This
plea bargain received much public criticism from Canadians because Bernardo's
first defence lawyer, Ken Murray for 17 months had withheld videotapes that
Bernardo made. This was considered crucial evidence, and prosecutors said that
they would have never agreed to the plea bargain if they had seen the tapes.
Murray was later charged with obstruction of justice, of which he was
acquitted, and he also faced a disciplinary hearing from the Law
Society of Upper Canada.
I appreciate
the dilemma that the lawyer was in. His first duty is to his client. He cannot
disclose what he has learned from his client to anyone without his client’s
permission. Obviously, Bernardo wasn’t going to give his lawyer permission to
give the tape to the prosecutor. If a client tells his lawyer about a crime he
is about to commit, the lawyer must report it to the police. But the video tape
was about two crimes that had already been committed. After the trial of
Bernardo’s and that of Homolka, he was then free to turn the video tape over to
the police; which he did.
Homolka's plea bargain had
been offered to her before the contents of the videotapes were available for
review. There was widespread
belief that she had always known where the videotapes were hidden and that she willfully concealed the Jane Doe incidents and, most importantly,
her claims of being under Bernardo's control that was a central tenet of her
plea bargain were false. Most people believed that those claims were dubious
anyway. She obviously didn’t want the
videotape shown as it would have shown that she played an important part in the
sexual abuse of the two victims and if that happened, there would be no plea
bargain offered to her and she would be facing murder charges.
After
her 1995 testimony against Bernardo, when Homolka returned to the Kingston's Prison For Women, a mximum security
prison her mother started to suffer annual breakdowns between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The collapses were
severe enough that she was hospitalized, sometimes for months at a time.
Homolka
was moved from Kingston in the summer of 1997 to the Joliette Institution, a medium security prison in Joliette, Quebec, 80 km
(49.7 miles) northeast of Montreal, a facility called
"Club Fed" by its critics. Beginning in 1995, female inmates in the
women’s prison in Kingston were gradually transferred to other federal
correctional institutions. On May 8, 2000, the last female inmate was
transferred away from the woman’s prison.
In the early 1970s, while I was conducting a
seminar to senior prison officials in Kingston over a three-day period, I visited
the Prison for Women along with other
federal prisons in the Kingston area.
As her release date of 4th July
2005 neared, rumors were rife that she would either relocate to Quebec or go to
a country where her case was unknown. After serving her full 12 years in 2005,
she was released from prison with the
restrictions placed upon her such as having to report regularly to the police
on her whereabouts and travel plans, not communicate with her former husband,
Paul Bernardo among other restrictions.
She told Radio Canada that
she’d be staying in Quebec since she found the media there less sensationalist
than in other English speaking provinces. She lived in Montreal until 2007,
upon which she moved to the Caribbean Island of Guadalupe so that her children
could live a more normal life. She now goes by Leanne Bordelais, the name of
the man she is married to who is the brother of her former lawyer.
The noted journalist, Paula
Todd wrote a book about the two Canadian killers and his one hour session at
Homolka’s home As soon as Todd’s book was published; it was met with shock and
anxiety by the people in Guadeloupe and in her current neighborhood. Her
husband’s family in Guadalupe wasn’t too pleased at all when they learned who
she really was and what she had done.
She is currently free to go where she wants and do
what she wants without reporting to the police. This has many people up in
arms, but Judge Burton commented four months after she was released from
prison, “The possibility that Ms. Teale (the name she was going under then) might
reoffend one day cannot be completely eliminated, however, her development over
the last 12 years demonstrates, on a balance of probabilities, that this is
unlikely to occur. She does not represent a real and imminent danger to commit
a personal injury offence.
No matter what she does, she will always be
regarded as one of Canada's most horrific criminals and perhaps the most
horrific of all female criminals.
It is a shame however that the families of her
victims and society in general were deprived of justice in her case. She really
did participate in assisting Bernardo in kidnapping the two young girls,
torturing and sexually molesting the victims and standing by when Bernardo was killing them and disposing of their bodies.
If the police had been more vigilant when searching
their home, they would have discovered the hidden video tape that would have
proved in court just how far that woman had gone to assist her then evil
husband in his horrific treatment of their two victims before they were
murdered. If that tape was shown in court before the plea bargain was offered
to her, she would be spending the rest of her life in prison.
I really feel sorry for her three children. Imagine
if you will what it will be like when they are grown adults, wondering if the
people they associate with really know who her mother really was and what she
had done to those unfortunate victims she and her evil husband had done to
them. Her children are in my opinion, also victims of her mother and Paul
Bernardo.
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