Bernardo’s many victims now face a grisly dilemma
So, what would you do if you were one of Paul Bernardo’s living victims?
Would you write out your victim impact statement some 25 years after he dragged you into woods and brutally raped you, knowing that your lingering pain would likely thrill his psychopathic mind?
Or would you trust our criminal justice system to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life as promised and afford him not a drop of your precious mental space, time or power?
That’s the grisly dilemma his many rape victims face, as well as the families of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy — the two teenage girls Bernardo kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered more than two decades years ago.
Bernardo was convicted in 1995 of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole before 25 years.
After his trial, Bernardo confessed to raping 14 women — 13 as the dreaded Scarborough rapist. He attacked most from behind, dragging them into bushes with a knife to their throats. Rather than going through another trial, the Crown applied that he be declared a “dangerous offender” — a designation reserved for Canada’s most violent criminals and sexual predators. Bernardo agreed.
During his sentencing, then-Associate Chief Justice Patrick LeSage called Bernardo a “sexually sadistic psychopath” for whom treatment was “remote in the extreme.” He said he should spend his life in prison.
Yet here he is, 20 years later, applying for day parole.
“It obviously impacts me,” says one of those women he confessed to attacking. For this column, I’ll call her Anne. “Simply, I don’t want him to know anything . . . But I tell my child how to deal with things by speaking up and using a voice.”
Criminal justice experts say emphatically that given his heinous record, Bernardo will never be let out of prison. But he has the right to apply. That right promises the possibility, however minuscule.
“You can’t take anything for granted,” says Tim Danson, the lawyer who has represented the Mahaffy and French families for more than two decades. “We don’t make assumptions. We lived through it.”
There’s this too: those 14 women never got their promised day in court, despite years of putting their lives on hold, waiting. Instead of pursuing 28 rape-related charges cases against Bernardo as well as a manslaughter charge for drugging and raping his sister-in-law, the Crown went after the dangerous offender designation. It was quicker, cheaper, less painful, and it promised to lock him up indefinitely.
But those women never got closure. They were never offered the public’s sympathetic shoulder.
They were given just one day to write their victim impact statements, which they were not permitted to read in court. Bernardo, however, got his chance to speak.
“I remember thinking, ‘What was the point of any of this?’ ” Anne says. “That was really, really unfair. Maybe I would have been terrified to speak. I’ll never know. I never got the chance.” There is something else. The letter Anne received from Correctional Service Canada alerting her to Bernardo’s day parole application informed her that “all information you provide must be shared with the inmate.” When she called CSC’s Victim Services to inquire if she, in turn, could see Bernardo’s application, she was told no for prisoner privacy reasons. (Correctional Services Canada refused to answer my question about this, but a handful of criminal lawyers confirmed this is standard.)
“It feels like he has rights that I don’t have as a victim — again,” says Anne.
I was in university during the Bernardo trial. I watched it like many of you, from afar. But I’m still haunted by some of the details. I can say with certainty, none of Bernardo’s victims — or their families — will every fully heal.
For Anne, she sees the biggest lingering impact in the overprotective way she parents. “I’m worried,” she says. “I panic about where my child is.” Her former partner would tell her to relax since, statistically, what were the chances of something bad happening?
“I was on the other end of the statistics,” she says.
She hasn’t yet decided whether she will attend Bernardo’s parole hearing. If his application is denied, he can apply again next year, and every year after that.
Criminal lawyer Edward Sapiano offers a different perspective on all this that I’ve found very helpful.
Parole hearings, he says, are a necessary checkup of our criminal justice system. They are what make us an “evolved society,” that believes in rehabilitation. They apply to everyone, even the most cruel and twisted among us.
“(Bernardo) is the object of this procedure, not the subject,” says Sapiano. “We are the subjects of this procedure. We are doing this for us, not him.”
Sapiano’s best friend was murdered at 20. He’s been personally touched by violent crime. Would he go to Bernardo’s parole hearing?
“Absolutely not,” he says. Catherine Porter’s column appears on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca.