Paul Bernardo leaves a Kingston court in 1997 after an appeal hearing into his double murder conviction. Photo: The Canadian Press files It’s the story that just won’t go away, and more’s the pity.
Most often, it’s been the convicted felon Karla Homolka who has unpleasantly floated to the surface of public consciousness now and then — now with the news of her marriage (to the brother of her Montreal prison lawyer, o sweet justice!), then that she was a mother, most recently two years ago when journalist Paula Todd tracked her down to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, where she lives with her hubby and their three youngsters.
But this time it’s Homolka’s ex, the serial killer and rapist Paul Bernardo, who made news this week when the Toronto Sun reported that he was planning to marry, his new bride a 30-year-old London, Ont., woman.
Mercifully, the paper didn’t identify her by name, it appears out of deference to her alleged mental fragility.
She allegedly has told friends that the man she’s been writing to for months is a kind, Christian fellow she believes to be innocent and that she has “wedding bands,” as well as a jaunty ankle tattoo that reads “Paul’s girl.”
For the uninitiated, Bernardo and Homolka formed a girl killing machine back in the early 1990s.
They started off with Homolka’s little sister, Tammy (she was drugged and sexually assaulted by the pair in the Homolka family home, then choked to death on her own vomit), before moving onto complete strangers (Burlington’s Leslie Mahaffy, who was just 14, and Kristen French, whom the pair kidnapped off the street in St. Catharines, Ont.).
Homolka struck a controversial plea bargain and was sentenced to 12 years for her role in the three deaths; two years later, in the summer of 1995, Bernardo went on trial for two counts of first-degree murder.
He was convicted, later pleaded guilty to being the Scarborough Rapist, and was declared a dangerous offender.
That means, on top of his life sentence (with no parole for 25 years), Bernardo has also been given an indeterminate sentence.
The chances of him ever getting out of prison — he’s theoretically eligible for day parole next year and full parole in 2018 — are pretty slim, which begs the question, is there a purpose, beyond the salacious aspect, of reviving this long, sad, sorry story?
It never had many good guys (the notable exceptions, the Mahaffy and French families) and almost no redemptive value, and things haven’t improved in the years since.
Yet the answer is still probably, yes.
For one thing, it is instructive to remember that if Bernardo were to apply for any form of parole, the state will not have in its arsenal what lawyers always call “the best evidence” against him.
That — 52 exhibits’ worth, including the notorious videotapes Bernardo and Homolka made of their sex assaults — was destroyed in December of 2001, by judge’s order, at a secret burning ceremony.
The ceremony was attended only by police, prosecutors and the victims’ families, and the only reason the public ever learned of it was that Donna French, Kristen’s mother, wanted the many Canadians who had supported the families to know they now had some measure of peace, that the evidence of their daughter’s degradation was no more.
What is left of the evidence is a written document with, on one side, a transcript of what was said on the videos and, on the other, a frame-by-frame description of what the videos depicted.
The secret incineration was an astonishing breach of the notion that justice in this country is meant to be conducted in public, and it was absolutely typical of how the state comported itself throughout.
Secondly, the Sun story offers a stark reminder of the vacuousness or wilful blindness of some women.
The one who has been writing Bernardo is repeatedly described by the paper as university-educated and “brilliant but troubled.” She reportedly lost a lover recently, and a job. She would do well to understand that most of the women who encountered her new boyfriend lost much more.
Finally, let us remember that as improbable as it may be that Bernardo could actually find someone to marry, it appears there would be no automatic prohibition on it, or even on the conjugal visits that would naturally follow.
Fifteen years ago, I covered the faint-hope hearing of a convicted killer named Amina Chaudhary. She had been found guilty of first-degree murder in the strangulation death of an eight-year-old boy in 1982. The little boy, Rajesh Gupta, was the beloved nephew of a lover who had dared to jilt her.
All that was interesting enough — that she was seeking early parole, unsuccessfully as it turned out, was evidence of what a prison psychologist called Chaudhary’s well-honed “sense of entitlement.”
But what utterly beggared belief was that while in the hoosegow, she had met and married another convicted killer (he, rank amateur, was convicted only of second-degree murder, and was paroled in 1998) and together, while behind bars, they enjoyed the “private family visiting program.”
Predictably enough, Chaudhary got pregnant — no fewer than three times — and gave birth in 1993, 1995 and 1997.
Thus is it genuinely in the public interest that Canadians know that Bernardo has found himself another girl, that there may or may not be wedding plans a-foot, and that if they were to wed, it’s not a given they wouldn’t get conjugal visits.
As Chaudhary once reminisced fondly while on the witness stand, “We were two people doing life sentences…”
So very little is impossible in Canada.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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