| Paul Bernardo | |
|---|---|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Paul Kenneth Bernardo |
| Also known as | Paul Jason Teale The Scarborough Rapist The Schoolgirl Killer |
| Born | August 27, 1964 Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Conviction | Murder Sexual assault |
| Sentence | Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole |
| Killings | |
| Number of victims: | 3+ |
| Span of killings | December 24, 1990–April 19, 1992 |
| Country | Canada |
| Date apprehended | February 17, 1993 |
Paul Kenneth Bernardo, also known as Paul Jason Teale[1] (born 27 August 1964 in Toronto, Ontario), is a Canadian serial killer and rapist, known for the sexual assaults and murders he committed with his wife Karla Homolka and the serial rapes he committed in Scarborough.
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Bernardo's mother, Marilyn, was the adopted daughter of a wealthy Toronto lawyer and his wife. His father, Kenneth, was the son of an English woman and an Italian immigrant who created a highly successful marble and tile business, but was abusive towards his wife and children. Instead of entering the family business, Kenneth Bernardo became an accountant. After her father had disapproved of an earlier boyfriend, Marilyn married Kenneth in 1960. Like his father, Kenneth Bernardo was said to be abusive. Marilyn, after having given birth to a son and a daughter, began seeing a former boyfriend. She became pregnant with his child and gave birth to Paul Kenneth Bernardo on August 27, 1964. Kenneth Bernardo tolerated his wife's affair and is listed as the biological father on Paul's birth certificate.
In 1975, Kenneth Bernardo fondled a girl and was charged with child molestation; he also sexually abused his own daughter.[2] Bernardo's mother became depressed over her husband's abuse, withdrew from family life and lived in the basement of their Scarborough home. Though the elder children felt the effects of the emotional and mental turmoil, young Paul appeared to be unscathed by it. In his book Lethal Marriage, Nick Pron describes the young Bernardo: "He was always happy. A young boy who smiled a lot. And he was so cute, with his dimpled good looks and sweet smile, that many of the mothers just wanted to pinch him on the cheek whenever they saw him. He was the perfect child they all wanted: polite, well mannered, doing well in school, so sweet in his Boy Scout uniform."[3]
Following an argument between his parents when Bernardo was 16, his mother told him of his actual parentage.[4] Repulsed, he began openly to call his mother "slob" and "whore".[5]
Bernardo graduated from Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute, opting to work for Amway, whose sales culture had a deep effect on him. "He bought the books and tapes of famous motivational get-rich-and-famous experts."[6] Bernardo and his friends practiced their techniques on young women they met in bars, and were fairly successful.[5] By the time Bernardo attended University of Toronto Scarborough, he had developed dark sexual fantasies, enjoyed humiliating women in public and beating up the women he dated.[5]
In October 1987, he met Karla Homolka.[5] They became sexually interested in each other almost immediately. Unlike the other girls he knew, she encouraged his sadistic sexual behaviour, also encouraging his acts as the "Scarborough Rapist."
Bernardo committed multiple sexual assaults, escalating in viciousness, in and around Scarborough, Ontario.[7] Most of the assaults were on young women whom he had stalked after they exited buses late in the evening.
Known incidents are:
Between May and September 1990, the police had submitted more than 130 suspects' samples for DNA testing when they received two reports that the person they were seeking was Paul Bernardo. The first, in June, had been called in by a bank employee. The second call was received from Tina Smirnis, the wife of one of the three Smirnis brothers who were among Bernardo's closest friends. Smirnis told the detectives that Bernardo "had been 'called in' on a previous rape investigation — once in December, 1987 - but he had never been interviewed."[2] He frequently talked about his sex life to Smirnis and liked analingus, rough sex and anal sex.[2]
Mr. Smirnis's phrasing was awkward and stilted and consequently left the detectives unsure of whether to take him seriously. But after cross-checking several files the detectives decided to interview Bernardo. The interview, on November 20, 1990, lasted 35 minutes and Bernardo voluntarily gave samples for forensic testing. When the detectives asked Bernardo why he thought he was being investigated for the rapes, he admitted that he did resemble the composite. The detectives concluded that such a well-educated, well-adjusted, congenial young man could not be responsible for the vicious crimes; he "was far more credible than...Smirnis who, with his awkward, strange way of speaking, might just be trying to collect the reward." Paul Bernado was released the following day.[2]
Following the interview, Bernardo drove to St. Catharines and held a secret meeting with Homolka, assuring her that he was not the Scarborough Rapist.
Bernardo moved permanently to St. Catharines on February 1, 1991. The sexual assaults in Scarborough had stopped. However, on April 6, 1991, Bernardo committed his 12th rape, this one in St. Catharines. Again, the victim was young (14). Unlike the other attacks, this one occurred early in the morning and he was not near a bus stop.
When she still worked at a pet shop (Martindale Animal Clinic, St. Catharines) two years earlier, Homolka had befriended a then 15-year-old girl. On June 7, 1991, Homolka invited the teen, referred to as "Jane Doe" in the ensuing trials, for a "girls' night out." After an evening of shopping and dining, Homolka took "Jane Doe" to 57 Bayview Avenue and began to ply her with alcohol laced with Halcion.
After "Jane Doe" lost consciousness, Homolka called Bernardo to tell him his surprise wedding gift was ready. They undressed the girl, who was a virgin, and Bernardo videotaped Homolka as she raped the girl before Bernardo vaginally and anally penetrated her. The next morning, the teenager was nauseated. She believed her vomiting was due to having drunk alcohol for the first time. She did not realize she had been violated.
She was invited back to Port Dalhousie (a district in northwest St. Catharines, situated on Lake Ontario) in August, this time to "spend the night". Foreshadowing what would later happen to Tammy Homolka, "Jane Doe," whose identity remains protected by law, stopped breathing after she was drugged and Bernardo had begun to rape her. Homolka called 911 for help but called back a few minutes later to say that "everything is all right." The emergency crew was recalled without follow-up.
"Jane Doe" visited the couple once more, on December 22, 1992. This time Homolka pressured her to have sex with Bernardo; she became upset and left.
By 1990, Bernardo was spending large amounts of time with the Homolka family, who liked him. He was engaged to the eldest daughter and flirted constantly with the youngest one. He had not told them that he had lost his job as an accountant, and instead was smuggling cigarettes across the nearby U.S.-Canadian border. He had become obsessed with Tammy Homolka, peeping into her window and entering her room to masturbate while she slept. Karla Homolka helped him by breaking the blinds in her sister's window to allow Bernardo access. In July, Bernardo took Tammy across the border to get beer for a party. While there, Bernardo later told his fiancee, "they got drunk and began making out."
According to Bernardo's testimony at his trial, on July 24, 1990, Karla Homolka laced spaghetti sauce with crushed Valium she had stolen from her employer, Martindale Animal Clinic. She served dinner to her sister, who soon lost consciousness. Bernardo began to rape Tammy while Karla watched.
Over the summer, he supplied Tammy and her friends with gifts, food, and sodas that had "a film and a few white flecks on the top."[2]
Six months before their 1991 wedding, Karla Homolka stole the anaesthetic agent Halothane from the clinic. On December 23, 1990, Homolka and Bernardo administered sleeping pills to the 15-year-old in a rum-and-eggnog cocktail. After Tammy was unconscious, Homolka and Bernardo undressed her and Karla applied a Halothane-soaked cloth to her sister's nose and mouth.
Karla Homolka wanted to "give Tammy's virginity to Bernardo for Christmas" as, according to Homolka, Bernardo was disappointed by not having been Karla's first sex partner. With Tammy's parents sleeping upstairs, the pair videotaped themselves as they raped her in the basement. Tammy began to vomit. The pair tried to revive her, then called 911, but not before they hid evidence, dressed Tammy, and moved her into her basement bedroom. A few hours later Tammy Homolka was pronounced dead at St. Catharines General Hospital without having regained consciousness.
Despite the pair's behaviour — vacuuming and washing laundry in the middle of the night,[2] and despite the presence of a chemical burn on Tammy's face, Niagara Regional Coroner and the Homolka family accepted the pair's version of events.[2] The official cause of Tammy Homolka's death was accidental — choking on her vomit after consumption of alcohol. The pair subsequently videotaped themselves with Karla wearing Tammy's clothing and pretending to be her. They also moved out of the Homolka house to a rented Port Dalhousie bungalow, to let her parents cope with their grief.
Early in the morning on June 15, 1991, Bernardo took a detour through Burlington, halfway between Toronto and St. Catharines, to steal licence plates. He found Leslie Mahaffy. The 14-year-old had missed her curfew after attending a funeral, was locked out of her house and had been unable to find anyone with whom she could stay overnight.
Bernardo approached her and told her he was looking to break into a neighbour's house. Unfazed, she asked if he had any cigarettes. As Bernardo led her to his car he blindfolded her, forced her into the vehicle and drove her to Port Dalhousie, where he informed Homolka that they had a playmate. Bernardo and Homolka subsequently videotaped themselves torturing and sexually abusing Mahaffy, all while listening to Bob Marley and David Bowie. At one point, Bernardo said "You're doing a good job, Leslie, a damned good job." Then he added, "The next two hours are going to determine what I do to you. Right now, you're scoring perfect." On another segment of tape, played at Bernardo's trial, the assault escalated. Mahaffy cried out in pain and begged Bernardo to stop. In the Crown description of the scene, he was sodomizing her while her hands were bound with twine. Later Mahaffy told Bernardo that her blindfold seemed to be slipping, an ominous development as it signalled the possibility that she might be able to identify both her tormentors if permitted to live.
The following day, Bernardo claimed, Homolka fed her a lethal dose of Halcion. Homolka claimed that, instead, Bernardo strangled her. The pair put her body in their basement.
The following day the Homolka family had arrived for dinner at the house.
After the Homolkas and their remaining daughter, Lori, had left, Bernardo and Homolka decided the best way to dispose of the evidence would be to dismember Leslie Mahaffy and encase each piece in cement. Bernardo bought a dozen bags of cement at a hardware store the following day. He kept the receipts which would prove damaging at his trial. Bernardo used his grandfather's circular saw to cut the body. Bernardo and Homolka then made numerous trips to dump the cement blocks in Lake Gibson, 18 kilometers south of Port Dalhousie. At least one of the blocks weighed 90 kg (200 pounds) and proved beyond the pair's patience or abilities to sink. It rested near the shore, where a father and son on a fishing expedition discovered it on June 29, 1991. Leslie Mahaffy's orthodontic appliance proved instrumental in identifying her.
On the afternoon of April 16, 1992, Bernardo and Homolka were driving through St. Catharines to look 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.
French 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 police. Within 24 hours, Niagara Regional Police (NRP) 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 Kristen'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 submissively to 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.
While Bernardo was out buying pizza on April 18 he was spotted by Kerry Patrich (see below), whom he had stalked the previous month. Her report to NRP was mishandled by police, as noted by Judge Archie Campbell in his 1995 inquiry into the police investigation of Bernardo's crimes, thus negating any chance of Kristen French's being discovered at the Bernardo house.
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 was originally thought that the hair was removed as a trophy, but Homolka testified that the hair had been cut to impede identification.
In addition to the confirmed murders of Tammy Lyn Homolka, Leslie Erin Mahaffy and Kristen Dawn French, suspicions remain about other possible victims or intended victims of Bernardo and/or Homolka.
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 which applied to Canadian newspapers and media, and the venue was moved to Toronto from St. Catharines, where the murders occurred. However, the ban did not affect American newspapers and television stations from nearby Buffalo, New York from reporting trial proceedings, which were easily seen in Southern Ontario. 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 without parole.[10] Later, Bernardo was also declared a "Dangerous Offender", making it unlikely he will ever be released.[11]
In return for a plea bargain (12 years in prison for manslaughter), Homolka testified against Bernardo in his murder trial.[12] This plea bargain received much public criticism from Canadians as Bernardo's first defence lawyer Ken Murray had withheld for 17 months 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.[13][14]
During her interrogation in 1993, Homolka told police Bernardo once bragged to her that he had raped as many as 30 women, double the 15 assaults police suspected he had committed. She described him as "the happy rapist."[15]
Bernardo has been kept in the segregation unit at the penitentiary for his own safety, nonetheless he has been attacked and harassed. Once he was punched in the face by another inmate while returning from a shower in 1996. In June 1999, five convicts tried to storm the segregation range where Bernardo lived and a riot squad had to use gas to disperse them.[16]
The Toronto Star reported on February 21, 2006, that Bernardo had admitted having sexually assaulted at least 10 other women in attacks not previously blamed on him. The majority of those assaults took place in 1986, a year before what police termed the reign of terror by the Scarborough Rapist. Authorities suspected Bernardo was the culprit in other crimes, such as a string of rapes in Amherst, N.Y., and the drowning death of Terri Anderson in St. Catharines. He has never acknowledged his involvement. It was reported that Bernardo's lawyer, Anthony G. Bryant, had forwarded this information to legal authorities the previous November.[17]
In 2006, Paul Bernardo gave an interview in prison suggesting he had reformed and would make a good parole candidate.[18][19] He was not eligible for release in 2010 under the "faint hope" clause, since he was convicted of multiple murders. Bernardo is not eligible to apply for parole until July 2020. Bernardo is currently serving his term in the maximum security prison at Kingston Penitentiary, in the segregation unit. He spends 23 hours a day in an 8' × 4' (244 × 122 cm) prison cell.
Homolka was released from prison on July 4, 2005. Several days before, Bernardo was interviewed by police and his lawyer, Tony Bryant. According to Bryant, Bernardo claimed that he had always intended to free the girls he and Homolka kidnapped. However, once Mahaffy's blindfold fell off, allowing Mahaffy to see Bernardo's face, Homolka was concerned that Mahaffy would identify Bernardo, and subsequently report them to the police. Further, Bernardo claimed that Homolka planned to murder Mahaffy by injecting an air bubble into her bloodstream, eventually causing an embolism.[20]