Fact: Karla Homolka is a serial schoolgirl killer and depraved human being.
Fiction: Karla Homolka was a battered woman coerced into committing unspeakable crimes out of fear for her life.
Indiscernible: Karla Homolka would never have hurt anybody if her path had not crossed, fatefully, with Paul Bernardo.
It could just as easily be posited that Bernardo — now serving a life sentence and deemed a dangerous offender, so that he’ll surely live out the remainder of his days in prison — might not have done murder without the aiding and abetting of Homolka. He was the Scarborough Rapist before killing three teenage girls, his assaults increasingly violent and sadistic. Perhaps he was headed towards homicide anyway as the natural progression of a psychopath. But no victims were slain until Homolka appeared on the scene, a co-operative accomplice in the drugging and tormenting of teenagers, including her own younger sister, Tammy, a virginal sexual offering who ended up just as dead as Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.
It is Homolka who remains the more compelling monster, still.
Not really that much of an enigma, actually, because most of the questions about her character were answered at Bernardo’s trial, where Homolka appeared as the star Crown witness. She was just cagey enough to admit, in her flat and affective way, the atrocities that couldn’t be denied because there was, belatedly, videotaped evidence. She held on as long as was necessary — until her “deal with the devil’’ had been signed — to the other secrets, the details that returned to her later, purportedly in a quasi dream state, of Tammy’s violation and death, of another procured victim, “Jane Doe,” who’d been sexually molested by her and Bernardo.
Now one other secret has been obliquely revealed: Homolka’s whereabouts, the life she’s living today as wife and mother to three young children.
Journalist and lawyer Paula Todd, following a reporter’s hunches and deft investigation, has succeeded where many others failed — ferreting out the slippery Homolka, following the scant clues to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe and securing an admittedly limited interview that tantalizes for what goes unsaid. The quote morsels are few. Caught flat-footed in her tropical lair, Homolka doesn’t unburden herself. She is, as ever, an opaque figure, the blank canvas portrayed so skillfully on the witness stand in 1995, where Homolka outwitted experienced lawyers and then waltzed off to complete a 12-year incarceration.
After almost stumbling over the address in an unspecified neighbourhood of an unnamed city, Todd catches her first glimpse of Homolka through an open window. “There, bent over the sink, is a petite woman with light hair,” writes Todd in her eBook, Finding Karla: How I Tracked Down an Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered a Mother of Three. “She turns her face sideways to see who’s arriving. Then she freezes. We reach into each other’s eyes at the same moment. A wave of amazement sweeps over me. I’m staring straight into the face of Canada’s most notorious female serial killer.
“I have found Karla Homolka, and I’m not sure which of us is more shocked.”
Homolka goes now as Leanne Bordelais, using her given middle name and her married surname. Her husband, Theirry, is the brother of Sylvie Bordelais, the Montreal lawyer who shielded Homolka from the media after the felon was released from prison, arranging just one interview that Homolka chose to conduct in French, the language she’d studied in jail. Twice in the immediate years afterwards, Homolka had been caught out by journalists, first a Toronto Sun reporter and then a Global TV crew. She’d had a baby, a boy, though it was never confirmed that Theirry was the father, even when he was briefly captured on camera carrying an infant.
And then, after 2002, Homolka vanished, no more than a cipher flitting through the blogosphere as unfounded rumours placed her everywhere from Paris to the Bahamas, resurrected at one point as sexual dalliance partner of Luka Rocco Magnotta — accused of murdering and dismembering Jun Lin, extradited this past week to Canada from Berlin — though this appears to have been a fabrication invented by Magnotta himself.
Todd — full disclosure here, she’s a close friend of mine — had come across a single flimsy document in her research that had suggested where to start looking for Homolka. It was Todd’s own deductions that put her on the tail of “Leanne Bordelais,” reasoning Homolka would be using her legal name — middle name and surname of her son’s father — after a Quebec court had rejected her name-change application. Todd further concluded that Homolka would have immigrated to a French-speaking country. In some ways, as Todd writes, she got very lucky but mostly it was down to old-fashioned leg-work and a facility for online research.
The key document Todd unearthed is what got her foot in the door. If I could find you, she told Homolka, so might somebody else. That clearly gave Homolka pause for thought. Homolka needed the document Todd held to cover her tracks again. A bargain of sorts was struck. “So it’s blackmail?” says the displeased Homolka, who grudgingly grants a one-hour audience over her husband’s objections.
She says little but it’s more than anyone else has elicited over the past decade. “I have no interest in rebutting what other people say. I never have . . . If I am honest with you, I don’t feel comfortable answering any questions from anybody, ever. I said it once.”
Any insights culled from this exchange must come from Todd. She is the one who witnessed Homolka interacting with husband and children, at one point arching her back and assuming a sultry pose as she breastfeeds her baby.
That’s the Karla Homolka those of us who saw her home sex movies in court will remember, a frankly carnal and lascivious creature, a predator without an ounce of conscience. That breast, now suckling a child, is familiar, as are all Homolka’s intimate body parts.
She was a succubus.
She is a killer.
It’s not a story she’ll tell her kids, tucking them in at night. But they’ll learn of it, someday.
Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday in the Toronto Star newspaper.
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