Why we need to remember Homolka’s past
Horrific crimes shouldn’t be forgotten
Back in the day, when Karla Homolka was testifying at the murder trial of her former husband Paul Bernardo, I fantasized that if I were independently wealthy, I would spend the rest of my life documenting the rest of hers.
It would be called Karla Watch, and sometimes there’d be nothing to report — just a recent picture of her and maybe a line saying “status quo” — but sometimes, there’d be lots.
It would have been my contribution to reminding people of just what she did, and her sweet plea bargain.
As it turns out, if I was right about nothing else, I was right that people would need reminding. Homolka bobbled to the surface of public consciousness again this week, as she periodically does, amid a controversy that she’d been volunteering at the private Christian school her three children attend.
While the school brass apparently knew about and were accepting of her criminal past, some of the parents didn’t and weren’t.
And while at first the school defended Homolka’s involvement, and actually told a couple of the complaining parents they weren’t welcome back next year, the academy has had a change of heart since, and now pledges that no one with a criminal history will be allowed to volunteer on school grounds.
What was interesting in the public discussion that followed was just how shallow is the collective memory.
Even NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, whose widely excerpted quotes appeared to suggest he was advocating forgiveness for Homolka (he actually wasn’t, but was rather wondering aloud how anyone can get past the stark horror of what she did), struggled to say more than that.
That Homolka and her husband have young children has also complicated things for some people. The kids are innocents, goes this thinking, and yet they suffer the sting of her crimes and occasional surfacings in the press.
That’s all true, of course. But Homolka chose to have children, after all, in the knowledge that she must be prepared to answer their questions when and if they came.
She’s always been awfully good at preparation.
When, for instance, Bernardo was just a weekend boyfriend — she was living in the bosom of her parents’ home in St. Catharines, Ont., with sisters Lori and Tammy, he was living in Toronto — and suggested that he’d like to “take Tammy’s virginity” (this is how the pair always described rape) one Christmas, Homolka may have demurred at first, but she quickly got a plan in place.
She worked at a vet clinic in those days, and researched what drugs would be best, settling on the anesthetic Halothane. She stole some.
Two nights before Christmas of 1990, the Homolkas gathered in the family room, Bernardo with his new video recorder, all of them drinking and watching movies. Eventually, they all went upstairs to bed except for Homolka, Bernardo and Tammy.
They had loaded Tammy’s drinks with crushed sleeping pills, so the teenager was already doped to the gills; she fell asleep. Homolka and Bernardo swung into action, she soaking a cloth with the Halothane and holding it over Tammy’s face, he directing Homolka to sexually assault her baby sister.
It was just after they had switched positions — Bernardo now raping Tammy, Homolka at the helm of the camera — that the teen vomited and stopped breathing.
She died, and despite a violent red burn on Tammy’s face that was never explained, thanks to Homolka’s swift thinking — she hid the drugs and threw the vomit-stained blankets into the wash — and a slow-witted cop who overruled his rightly suspicious younger colleague, the death was written off as accidental.
Only years later, at Homolka’s plea, did the truth of Tammy’s death emerge.
At that brief and essentially private proceeding — most of the evidence was under a sweeping publication ban, allegedly to protect Bernardo’s fair-trial rights but as much to shield state conduct from scrutiny — Homolka pleaded guilty to manslaughter for her role in the abduction, sexual assaults and deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, and, oh yes, her own sister.
She received a 12-year sentence and served every day of it, emerging in 2005 as a free woman.
As heinous as her conduct was in the Mahaffy and French deaths — she was an eager participant and though she had opportunities to get help, didn’t lift a finger for either girl — it was her voluntary handing over of her own flesh and blood, in the family home with her parents and other sister asleep upstairs, that is her original sin, and tells the tale. It was here that she crossed a bright line — and remember, she was not then in Bernardo’s thrall, certainly not his victim, but rather was an independent, free-spirited young woman with her own money and circle of friends.
As she once snapped at Bernardo’s lawyer, John Rosen, who was pressing her to explain how on earth she could have agreed to attack Tammy, it was only going to be the once, “a one-time thing.”
Just a few weeks later, Homolka dressed up in her dead sister’s clothes, holding a picture of her over her face, and pretended to be her as she and Bernardo had sex. That’s how consumed with grief and regret she was; this is what needs to be remembered.