She gave her own sister as a "Christmas present" to her criminal boyfriend
1. Two teenage kidnappings and murders
St. Catharines is a small city in Ontario, Canada. It is close to the Canada-US border and only 19 kilometers away from the United States. The manufacturing industry and industry are developed. Because there are many gardens in the city of St. Catherine, it is also nicknamed "Garden City" by Canadians.
From 1991 to 1992, there were two kidnappings and murders of children in Garden City and its neighboring cities. Both victims were underage girls who were kidnapped near their homes.
The second case occurred on April 16, 1992, the day after the three-day Easter holiday across Canada.
Kristen French, 15, walked home as usual after school at 2:45 p.m.
Kristen is a student at St. Catherine's High School. In 1992, she was 15 years old. She was a confident, smart and steady brown-haired girl. Not only did she get all A grades in her studies, she was also a member of the rowing team.
Kristen
Kristen 's home is very close to her high school, only 1.1 kilometers, and it takes no more than 15 minutes to walk. Most of the time, her walking path is next to a road with traffic and passes a church.
On weekdays, Kristen would be home on time at around 3 o'clock almost every day. Even if there was a temporary emergency, she would responsibly call and explain to her family, but on the afternoon of April 16, she disappeared without a sound. .
At 4:30 p.m., Kristen's parents became uncontrollably anxious. They searched all the possible places she could be and called her friends, but no one knew where Kristen was.
Even more worrying, less than a year ago, there was a child kidnapping and murder case in the area.
In the early hours of June 15, 1991, 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy went missing in her backyard.
Fourteen days after she disappeared, police recovered seven blocks of cement containing her body in Gibson Lake in St. Catharines. Her torso was later accidentally scooped up by a fishing enthusiast.
After the Leslie case, the police invested millions of Canadian dollars in solving the case and set up a task force, but unfortunately nothing. Before Kristen disappeared, he also reminded other students to pay attention to safety.
On April 16, 1992, at 4:55 p.m., a woman was hurrying past the church parking lot when she noticed a reddish-brown women's leather shoe on the ground. These are Kristen's shoes.
Because the woman was really busy that afternoon, she took a quick glance at the shoes and walked away, still lying there when she returned to church hours later.
At about 6 pm on April 16, 1992, Kristen's parents anxiously called the police.
Because the Leslie case happened before, the police took Kristen's disappearance very seriously and immediately started to investigate the matter. They talked to her teachers, classmates, and friends, organized personnel to search for Kristen, and conducted radio and television broadcasts. report her disappearance.
At about 11 o'clock in the evening, the police finally found the reddish-brown leather shoe in the parking lot. When they handed the shoes to Kristen's mother for identification, Kristen's mother burst into tears.
Near the red-brown leather shoes, police found a fragment of a map and a strand of brown hair. The police judged from the shape of the hair break that the brown hair was probably cut by a knife. Because of the rain on the day of the crime, the wet brown hair and map fragments remained near the shoes and were not blown away by the wind.
As mentioned earlier, the church is near a busy street, and police were quickly called to provide clues as soon as news of Kristen's disappearance came out. It is a pity that no one can see the appearance of the kidnapper.
According to a witness, she was driving by around 3 p.m. that day when she saw a man standing in front of a car with his back to the road, trying to shove something into the passenger seat. At the time, she thought he was just trying to put a large item in the car, and drove off without much thought.
Among other things, the witness recalled that the car the man was driving looked like an earth-colored Chevrolet Camaro, but she wasn't sure.
Another eyewitness reported that she had seen two young men from a distance trying to push the other into the car that afternoon. She also didn't think much of it, thinking it was just teenagers playing around.
On April 30, 1992, 14 days after Kristen's disappearance, two passersby found Kristen's naked body in a ditch next to a road in St. Catherine's Promenade.
The body showed obvious signs of being sexually assaulted and beaten. The murderer carefully cleaned Kristen's body and cut her hair before throwing it away.
From the scars on Kristen's body, the police suspect that the murderer who killed Kristen was the same person who kidnapped and killed Leslie in 1991.
Based on the clues left over from the Leslie case, the testimony of multiple witnesses, and the profiles of the FBI profiler (the Canadian police asked the FBI for help), the Canadian police judged that they were looking for two blue-collar workers who drove a car Earth-colored old Camaro, most likely in the mechanical repair business.
After the Kristen case, the task force searched almost all over Ontario, but could never find a breakthrough in the investigation. It was not until nine months later, when the real criminal was arrested, that they realized that their search direction was outrageously wrong.
2.Scarborough serial rape
While Niagara police (the city of St. Catharines) are trying to find the killers of two teenage murders, police in Scarborough, more than 100 kilometers away, are focusing on another old case - the Scarborough serial rape.
Scarborough is located in the east of Toronto, the city is close to Lake Ontario and has beautiful scenery. Scarborough was incorporated into Toronto in 1998 and is now a borough of the City of Toronto.
Between May 1987 and May 1990, there was a series of serial rapes in the area, the victims were all women, usually between the ages of 14 and 22.
Criminals are often nocturnal, and most victims are attacked shortly after getting off the bus and walking home alone.
Before committing the crime, the criminal will follow them for a distance, then attack the victim from behind, or ambush in the bushes on the side of the road ahead of time, and suddenly jump out.
He violently beats and binds the victim, threatens her with a knife not to speak, and not to look at him. In order to save their lives, victims usually do not dare to resist. The offender then beats the victim while sexually assaulting them, including sodomy, and forces them blow job
Mental torture of victims is another characteristic of Scarborough rapists. He would press for the victim's name and then give extremely insulting instructions ("Put your ass up!"). He also asks them to keep praising him while sexually assaulting them, forcing them to tell him "I love you" over and over again.
In later cases, the Scarborough rapists developed another egregious form of torture. He would pretend to leave his victims, then attack them again from behind when they finally got up the courage, shivering and ready to rise from the cold ground.
On top of that, the Scarborough rapists were extremely good at mind manipulation. He will take the victim's wallet or documents and other personal items after the rape, threatening the victim that he knows who she is and where her family lives, and that if she dares to call the police, he will kill her/them.
From 1987 to 1990, the "Scarborough rapists" sexually assaulted at least 11 victims and made at least 5 attempted rapes. Considering that the reported rate of rape cases was less than 50% at that time, the actual number of victims will be more.
In March 1989, the police set up a Rape Task Force (which, despite this, was severely understaffed with only 10 police officers) to investigate all rape cases in the area.
But in 1991, the rampant serial rapist suddenly disappeared and stopped committing crimes.
3.One of 224 suspects
The case was solved thanks to a DNA sample collected by police as usual.
Before the Scarborough rapists stopped their activities, the police had publicly solicited clues from the public.
In May 1990, Scarborough rapist attacked a victim from the front. The brave young lady described exactly what the suspect looked like:
Young Caucasian male, between 1.8m - 1.9m tall, of medium build, muscular, with light blond hair (eyes may be blue), wheat-colored skin and no beard.
According to her description, the police used a computer to draw and release the suspect portrait of the Scarborough rapist.
In fact, as early as March 1988, through the descriptions of several victims, the task force drew a portrait of the suspect (highly similar to the picture above), but did not choose to make it public.
Why would the police do this? On the one hand, perhaps because the police didn't want to startle the police, in May 1988, a police officer patrolling near the bus stop almost caught the suspect, but unfortunately he eventually escaped.
On the other hand, there was a stereotype of rapists within the Toronto police at the time - they didn't really believe that a handsome man would rape, and such a person should have no shortage of sexual resources.
This misconception about rapists is still widespread, even 30 years later. Although rape involves sex, as criminologist Peter Forensky points out in his book <Left of Reason, Right of Madness> -the goal of most rapists is not sex, but control and domination.
When Toronto police released the portrait in 1990, they received nearly 16,000 leads. Among them, three reported that the portrait looked exactly like Paul Bernardo.
Of the three reports, the most weighty one came from Paul's friend's brother, Alexander, and his wife, Tina. Alexander's family lived diagonally across from Paul's house, and he had known Paul since he was a child.
According to Alexander, Paul was a handsome, cunning, manipulative, boastful, irritable, and immoral man who drove a white Carpi (previously, several victims had told the police that the criminal Drive a white Carpi) with a knife in the car.
Alexander told the police that Paul was always on several boats, liked to date girls who were much younger than him and had no opinion, and had severely abused, including sexually, his ex-girlfriend Jennifer.
He also mentioned that in March of that year, when Paul and his brother went to play in Florida, USA, they raped a girl who was in a drunken coma. And he'd mentioned getting some girls to rape when he was out driving with his brother before.
After chatting with Alexander, the police found Paul's ex-girlfriend, who affirmed Alexander's testimony. But it wasn't until more than two months later that the police found Paul.
In addition to the shortage of staff, more importantly, the police did not take "weird" Alexander too seriously. Alexander's family is a Greek immigrant. He speaks English stubbornly. Police did not consider his testimony reliable.
On November 19, 1990, the police questioned Paul.
As soon as he entered the interrogation room, the tall, stocky, handsome and polite young man joked with the police: "This is more stressful than a job interview."
Paul told the officers who questioned him that he had just graduated from the University of Toronto and now lives in Scarborough with his parents and will soon pass the accountant exam. He has been with PwC for the past few years, but he recently quit his job and decided to start his own business.
Paul said he loved his girlfriend Karla Homolka , the two fell in love at first sight, has been in love for 3 years, she lives in St. Catharines, is a veterinary assistant. They will be married soon. After marriage, he will move from Scarborough to her city.
Paul took the initiative to mention to the police that he knew he looked similar to the suspect's portrait, and that Alexander and a few other friends were always joking about it, but he didn't think it was funny at all. He would never do this to women. And he didn't need to rape anyone, he had a girlfriend all the time.
Within 35 minutes of being interviewed by the police, Paul acted like a confident, elite youth.
As usual, Toronto police collected Paul's DNA samples (the police had previously successfully extracted the criminal's DNA from the victim's clothing), but did not list Paul as the number one suspect in need of expedited treatment.
In 1990, although DNA alignment technology had appeared, it was immature. At the time, there was only one forensic laboratory in the entire city of Toronto that could compare DNA, but there were as many as 50,000 samples lined up for analysis.
Paul's DNA samples, along with samples from 223 other suspects, waited on the shelves of the laboratory for two years, until the end of January 1993, when the results of the DNA comparison finally came out.
The DNA of the Scarborough rapist highly overlaps with Paul's. This young man who seems to be sunny and cheerful and harmless to humans and animals is the Scarborough rapist.
By this time, Paul had already moved to St. Catharines, and in February 1991, he and Karla rented a two-story single-family house together, and the two got married soon after.
Four months after Paul and Carla started living together, Leslie was kidnapped from Lin City and dumped by Gibson Lake in St. Catharines. Less than a year later, Kristen was arrested in St. Catharines.
4.Breakthrough
Police investigating two child murders have been mixed to learn that the Scarborough rapist lived in St. Catharines.
The joy is that nearly 2 years after the Leslie case, a "reliable" suspect finally appeared; the worry is that they don't have any evidence in their hands to help them determine whether Paul is the real murderer.
Niagara police desperately needed a breakthrough.
Coincidentally, Paul's wife, Karla, had just left him recently.
Karla was born on May 4, 1970, has a Czech immigrant father and a Canadian mother. There are three girls in her family, and she is the eldest.
She met Paul in 1987, when Carla was still in high school, working part-time at a pet store, and Paul was 24 years old, graduating from college and working at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
On October 17 of that year, Karla and her friends attended a pet show in Scarborough. In the evening, when the two were eating in the hotel restaurant, they ran into Paul and his friend.
Paul and Karla fell in love at first sight, the two subsequently had a relationship, and the following weekend, when Paul drove from Scarborough to St. Catharines to visit Karla, the two began dating and fell in love.
At that time, Paul would drive to St. Catharines to see Karla almost every weekend, and later, at Carla's request, Paul would go to see her every Wednesday after get off work.
Although Karla wanted to study criminology at the University of Toronto before graduating from high school, she decided not to go to college because of the encounter with Paul and to continue working in a veterinary clinic. In late December 1989, after two years of dating, Paul proposed to Carla, and the two married in June 1991.
Despite the 6-year gap between the couple, Karla and Paul are seen as a perfect match by those around them, both blond and beautiful, from middle-class families, and share the same hobbies (criminal novels and movies) and seemed very happy when they were together.
It wasn't until a year ago (1992) that Carla's colleagues noticed that she was getting more and more inexplicable bruises.
On January 5, 1993, Karla was admitted to the hospital for domestic violence. At the time, she had broken ribs, bruises on her arms, thighs and buttocks, a crack in her skull, and she was completely blacked out around her eyes (Caused by hemorrhage at the base of the anterior skull).
Karla told the family that Paul first hit her with his fists and then hit her with a flashlight after complaining that his hands were sore. According to the doctor who treated Karla, it was the worst case of domestic violence he had ever seen.
After being hospitalized, Karla sued Paul for domestic violence and sneaked home to pack while he was arrested. In order to avoid Paul, after leaving the hospital, she moved into the house of her uncle and aunt in Toronto.
On February 9, 1993, the police questioned Karla at her uncle's house. At first Karla thought the police were learning about domestic violence, but she soon realized that what they really wanted to know was the two child murders.
In front of the police, Karla denied everything, but when the police left, she broke down, crying and telling her aunt that Paul killed Leslie and Kristen and forced her to participate in the crime.
Karla's aunt and uncle believed her. What they don't know is that Karla is only telling part of the crimes she committed with Paul:
In addition to appealing two murders, Karla also helped Paul rape his own sister, which eventually led to her accidental death. In addition, she also helped Paul rape another 15-year-old girl.
What the hell did the couple do? Is Karla really, as she claims, just a wife forced to commit crimes because of domestic violence?
Because after the incident, Karla and Paul disagreed and identified each other as the murderer. Let us first take a look at the crime of these two people, and then discuss who is the real murderer and their respective motives.
5. evil plan
The first murder occurred late at night on December 23, 1990.
It was two days before Christmas, and the whole city of St. Catharines was in a strong festive atmosphere, with Karla's family at home, and Paul with them (Paul had resigned from PwC by then and moved into Karla's house)
Karla's family lives in a semi-detached four-story house. Karla's bedroom is located in the basement of the house, and outside the door is the living room with a sofa and TV.
After dinner, Karla's family moved from the dining room to the warm living room one after another, watching TV and eating Christmas desserts.
There was a sofa next to the floor lamp in the living room of Karla's house. On the evening of the 23rd, this seat was occupied by Tammy. She held a glass of eggnog in her hand and looked a little dizzy.
Tammy, the youngest girl in the Karla family, turns 16 in two weeks.
Tammy has a lively personality and loves sports. She is one of the best youth football players in St. Catharines, and she is also very good at track and field. Like her older sister Karla, Tammy has blonde hair and big, round eyes that make her look very cute.
Although Tammy is still young, she can have a few drinks with everyone over the Christmas break. That night, Paul made a special cocktail for her.
Late at night, Tammy looked groggy and smirked to himself. At the time, both Karla's parents and Laura (Karla's second sister) thought Tammy was just too light and drunk.
What they don't know is that Paul and Karla put ground triazolam (a sedative-hypnotic drug) into Tammy's wine.
The pills in Paul and Karla's hands come from the pet hospital where Karla works. In addition to the pills, Karla stole some liquid halothane.
This is a dangerous drug with a very strong anesthetic effect. It is very easy to cause excessive anesthesia, resulting in respiratory depression and arrhythmia in the anesthetized person. Only trained professionals are qualified to use it, and Karla is obviously not included in this list.
According to the couple's plan, they would drug Tammy and then rape her in the living room.
Speaking of the motives of these two people, it is necessary to mention Karla's last relationship. Because Karla had had a sexual relationship with her ex-boyfriend before she met Paul, and Paul was always worried that Karla was not a virgin, the two agreed that Tammy's chastity was Karla's compensation for Paul and Paul's "Christmas gift" .
In order to realize this evil plan, earlier on the 23rd, the couple also rented a movie and invited Tammy to stay up late at night to watch it with them.
In the early morning of the 24th, everything started as planned. While the others went upstairs to rest, Tammy stayed.
In order to make Tammy unconscious as soon as possible, Paul made Tammy another big cup of hot chocolate and put a lot of triazolam into it. Not long after the movie started, Tammy passed out on the sofa under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
6.Christmas Tragedy
When Karla poked Tammy and found she wasn't awake, Karla poured some halothane on a towel and covered Tammy's mouth and nose while Paul took out his VCR,
Earlier, Paul had used the video recorder to film the happy Christmas holiday clip of the Kara family, and now the video camera is aimed at his and Tammy's genitals.
Paul first molested Tammy, then raped her, while Karla kept covering Tammy's mouth and nose with a towel.
In the course of Paul and Karla's crime, Karla always seemed nervous. At first, she kept urging Paul to hurry up, and later she repeatedly urged him to wear a condom, and she got angry and cursed because of it.
Compared to Karla, Paul doesn't seem to feel the urgency in the room, doesn't realize the risk (whether it's the risk of Tammy's accident, or the risk of them being discovered), and he berates Karla several times for shutting up and being reckless. He molested the unconscious Tammy, not at all in a hurry to end it all.
Then Paul got off Tammy and changed the tape on the VCR. At the same time, he began repeatedly urging Karla to sexually assault Tammy with his mouth.
Carla refused (Tammy was on her period at the time), and Paul grabbed her hair and pressed her head in front of Tammy's legs. He then asked her to rape Tammy with her fingers and ordered her to lick her fingers to taste Tammy's menstruation.
Paul's orders were short and rhymed, like army training slogans, full of fanatical repetition.
"Taste good? Not bad uh?"
"No," Karla said in disgust.
“Is it delicious”
"No!"
"Delicious?"
"It's fucking disgusting!"
Paul turned off the tape and slapped Karla hard on the arm, not the answer he was expecting, and Karla should have told the camera that she enjoyed it all.
"Does it taste delicious?" Paul turned on the camera and asked Carla again, but she refused to cooperate.
During the rape of Tammy, Paul is like an avid porn director (and a spitting giant baby), basking in his own fantasies. He dictates, dictates the actions of others, accepts only what he wants to hear, and forcibly tries to make reality his fantasy.
In my opinion, Paul's behavior mirrors the previous point very well: sex doesn't have to be the motive for rape, control and domination are. In this crime, Karla and Tammy's "submission" is probably what really irritates Paul.
Ugly and despicable is that Paul, who was now 27 years old, achieved this by stunning and raping a 15-year-old girl through drugs.
After this, Paul handed the camera to Karla to hold while he sexually assaulted Tammy again. In the process of Paul sodomizing Tammy, suddenly, he realized that something didn't seem right, and then Tammy vomited and his face turned purple.
Paul and Karla panicked immediately. They dragged Tammy into Karla's room, dressed her, and tried to clear her throat, but Tammy had stopped breathing.
Karla then called the ambulance and began tidying up the crime scene, hiding the drugs they had previously used and pouring the liquid drug down the drain. The noise in the house woke Karla's parents, and when the ambulance came, they followed the car to the hospital, while Karla and Paul were left at home pending police questioning.
In the early morning of December 24, after Tammy reached the hospital, doctors pronounced her dead.
At the time, Tammy had large orange marks on his face, apparently from chemical-induced burns.
According to the confessions of Karla and Paul (the two sat on the police station bench for nearly an hour before being interrogated separately, and remained close to each other), they were watching with Tammy early in the morning on December 24. Movie. Suddenly, Tammy vomited and choked. Afterwards, they dragged her into Karla's room, tried to clear the vomit from her throat, and called 911.
In response to the marks on Tammy's face, the two explained that it was formed by the friction between Tammy's face and the carpet when Paul dragged Tammy.
As for why Paul dragged Tammy from the living room into the room, after investigating the scene, the police accepted the explanation from the two men.This is because the lights in the living room are darker, while the lights in Karla's room are brighter.
Although the police did not find Paul and Karla's behavior particularly suspicious, they conducted a simple autopsy on Tammy, which only found a certain amount of alcohol in Tammy's body, and found no other abnormalities ( the police think it is drugs).
In the end, the police accepted Paul and Karla's rhetoric and judged Tammy's death as an accident. As for the burn marks on Tammy's face, doctors suspect that it was caused by the acid in her stomach when she vomited (though that explanation isn't very convincing).
On December 27, 1991, Tammy was buried in the Victoria Cemetery.
In the process of rape Tammy, Karla appeared fearful and nervous, but in the other three sexual assault cases, her performance was very different. What else did Paul and Karla do? What kind of punishment did the two get in the end? We will continue to push the second episode in the next report