The Evil That Men Do Part 27

Like his fantasies of committing joint murder, her husband never acted on this impulse, she says.

Mich.e.l.le, like Debra, did try to break away. Once, after a particularly brutal beating, she went to the local police, a very small agency, with her story. The officer who interviewed her turned out to be a Vietnam vet, just like Jack. After listening to her story, he advised Mich.e.l.le to return to her marriage.

She learned to cope with Jack's physical abuse by dissociating, pushing her mind anywhere but the here and now as he whipped her, beat her, kicked her, pulled her hair, and threw her around the room. By this time, six years or more into their marriage, Mich.e.l.le had been completely broken down. Jack had destroyed her will. She didn't care what happened.

Then came a transforming moment. One day, Jack began punching and slapping Mich.e.l.le as Sarah, then a toddler of about three, sat on the couch. Mich.e.l.le could absorb the punishment, but she feared now for her little girl.

Jack turned for a moment, and suddenly, Mich.e.l.le found herself pointing his loaded shotgun at the back of his head. He was totally unaware of the instant oblivion to which his compliant companion was about to consign him.

But she couldn't pull the trigger.

Mich.e.l.le lowered the gun, realizing that nothing could drive her to homicide. But seeing her baby in peril nevertheless had galvanized her. She had felt a force, mother love, that was even stronger than her fear of her husband. If Mich.e.l.le couldn't escape from Jack for her own sake, she could for the child's.

She left in the night, taking with her only Sarah and some clothing. Ironically, Mich.e.l.le fled to one of the very social contacts Jack had ever allowed her, a loose-knit group of wives of other Vietnam vets. These women saved her.

Mother and daughter spent weeks on the run, moving from house to house, shelter to shelter, sometimes with her enraged husband, who vowed to kill her, very close behind. Finally, Mich.e.l.le returned to the doubtful security of her parents' house, where Jack need not even approach her to keep Mich.e.l.le in perpetual fear.

"In the beginning," she writes in her personal history, I was so terrified that I couldn't ride sitting up in a car. I just knew he would shoot me. If anyone walked behind me, cold chills went up my spine. I had to see in all directions, and worry that he might be hiding nearby. So many little things through the day kept me in a state of panic: sounds, sights, smells. I kept the drapes pulled, and wouldn't turn my back on an open window. Every man that I saw looked like him. I was very paranoid, and in fear for my life. . . . He lived in my dreams. . . . My eyes would open, but I couldn't wake up. I would run upstairs, turn a light on, and sit. But my feet were still moving beneath my chair.

Mich.e.l.le suffered depressions as black as Debra's, and was hospitalized four times. Like Debra and the self-destructive third marriage she entered after discovering Bob was a killer, Mich.e.l.le also plunged into a disastrous relationship with a married woman, which compounded her emotional turmoil.

But also like Debra, Mich.e.l.le met with Roy Hazelwood and told him her story, the first step toward healing, and reclaiming her life.

Slowly, she put Jack, and most of the rest of her troubles, in the back of her mind. She went to college, where she did well and discovered her first small sense of self-esteem.

Although by no means fully recovered, Mich.e.l.le is holding tight to her daughter, and to hope.

"I'm learning how to live all over again," she says. "I'm attempting to take control of my life, one step at a time. With determination in my heart, I know I will make it."

21.

Ken and Barbie Karla h.o.m.olka is an enigma.

Bright, intensely feminine, and outwardly well adjusted, the twenty-two-year-old veterinarian's a.s.sistant stunned Canadian lawmen in 1993 when she confessed her active role in a s.a.d.i.s.tic husband-and-wife killing spree.

To their neighbors in suburban Port Dalhousie, Ontario, the winsome Karla and her curly-headed husband, Paul Bernardo, seemed like a perky pair of well-scrubbed yuppies sprung straight to the headlines from a Mattel catalog.

They were jokingly known as Ken and Barbie.

Together, their abduction-murder victims included at least two teenage girls, both strangled with an electrical cord, plus Karla's own little sister, Tammy, whom Bernardo had demanded as a Christmas 1990 "gift."

Karla obliged him, providing the Halcion with which Tammy was surrept.i.tiously sedated in her parents' bas.e.m.e.nt on Christmas Eve. Karla also brought from her job at a veterinary clinic a liquid anesthetic for animals, which she poured into a cloth and held over her sleeping sister's mouth. Karla looked on as Bernardo raped the comatose teen, while the rest of the h.o.m.olka family slept upstairs.

Later that Christmas Eve, Tammy drowned in her own vomit.

Bernardo's secret videos of the a.s.saults included scenes of Karla performing, at Paul's direction, various s.e.xual acts on the victims, including oral and digital s.e.x on her unconscious sister.

To a horror-struck public, it seemed as if some gigantic disconnect had occurred. Karla and Paul were as unlikely-looking a pair of deviant felons as Ted Bundy had been a serial s.e.x killer.

To Hazelwood, however, Paul Bernardo was a textbook s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t.

Of the thirteen blitz-style s.e.xual a.s.saults he later admitted committing as the so-called Scarborough Rapist, the first occurred about five months before he met Karla h.o.m.olka. Bernardo at the time was living with his parents in Scarborough, a blue-collar Toronto suburb of strip malls and car dealerships, known in tonier sections of the city as Scarberia.

Bernardo was about to graduate with an accounting degree from the local campus of Toronto University. He also was a small-potato scam artist, a member of a gang who stole and peddled hot computers and other big-ticket consumer items.

At about 1:00 a.m. on May 4,1987 (coincidentally, Karla's birthday), the handsome twenty-three-year-old Bernardo followed a twenty-one-year-old woman from her bus stop to her front lawn in Scarborough. There, Bernardo threw the girl to the ground and raped her both v.a.g.i.n.ally and a.n.a.lly. He also pummeled the victim's face, arms, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Nine days later, in similar circ.u.mstances in the same community and using the same bus stop MO, Bernardo attacked a nineteen-year-old female, beating her with his fists and dragging her into her backyard, where he bound the young woman's wrists and lashed her by her neck to a fence, using her belt. This time, he also produced a knife, and said he'd slit her throat if she made a sound.

As far as is known, Bernardo did not strike out again as the Scarborough Rapist until December 1987. In the meantime-mid-October-he met seventeen-year-old Karla h.o.m.olka, a high school senior from St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, who was visiting Toronto with a girlfriend.

Bernardo was trolling for girls with a buddy when he encountered h.o.m.olka in a Howard Johnson hotel restaurant. Within an hour they were in bed together in her room, heedless of her girlfriend and his male friend, sitting only a few uncomfortable feet away.

Later, those who believed that Karla, like Paul, should spend the rest of her life in prison, argued that a relationship so instantly and intensely s.e.xual suggested to them that the comely schoolgirl from St. Catharines had a wanton side, and was far less a victim, and much more a willing victimizer, than she appeared.

Karla, who had a reputation among her friends as a free spirit before meeting Bernardo, seemed awestruck by him, they said, overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to resist him. The transformation was abrupt and dramatic and complete.

Among the explanations advanced for her behavior was that Karla was s.e.xually excited by the menace she sensed in Paul.

John Money, a Johns Hopkins University s.e.x researcher, describes such a paraphilia, which he calls "hybristophilia" in his book Love Maps.

According to Money, the hybristophile (from the Greek, hybrizein, "to commit an outrage against someone," plus philia) is s.e.xually aroused by the knowledge her partner has committed a violent act, such as rape or murder or bank robbery.

Money says one of the purest expressions of hybristophilia is actress Faye Dunaway's behavior as outlaw Bonnie Parker in the opening scenes of the movie Bonnie and Clyde.

As Dunaway plays her, the libidinous Parker joins the handsome Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow on a bank robbery and subsequent car chase. Parker is so erotically stimulated by the gunplay and danger that she impulsively gropes Barrow, and attempts to disrobe the surprised outlaw in the front seat of their stolen getaway car.

As Money explains it, the hybristophile's behavior is not compliant, but collusive. "Compliancy means you follow instructions," he says. "Collusion means you fit yourself in to become the other person's counterpart."

By late 1987, Karla was seeing Paul almost every weekend, and spending as much as two hundred dollars a month on telephone calls to him from her parents' house in St. Catharines. Karla decorated her bedroom mirror with Paul's photos, and doodled his name in her high school notebooks. Paul also called Karla nearly daily, sent flowers, and took the schoolgirl to expensive restaurants on weekends.

On December 16, 1987, the Scarborough Rapist attacked his third known victim, a fifteen-year-old girl, at about 8:30 p.m. as she was walking home from her bus stop.

"It was a repet.i.tion of the other attacks involving v.a.g.i.n.al and a.n.a.l intercourse while the victim's head was pushed into the ground," wrote retired Canadian appeals judge Patrick T. Galligan in his subsequent review of the case.

He ran his knife along the victim's back, then grabbed her by the hair and pounded her head against the ground. He forced her to perform f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o, then to lick his p.e.n.i.s and say that she loved it. He made her wish his p.e.n.i.s a Merry Christmas. The a.s.sault lasted an hour. . . . Medical examination disclosed a torn hymen, two tears in her a.n.u.s, plus a number of abrasions on other parts of her body.

Throughout 1988, Bernardo continued his periodic s.e.xual a.s.saults as the Scarborough Rapist, while gradually metamorphosing, according to Karla h.o.m.olka's later account, from her caring and attentive lover into a cruel and violent master.

Soon after Christmas 1987, Judge Galligan reports, [h]is treatment of her began to change subtly and very gradually. . . . He began telling her what to wear and how to style her hair. He told her where she could go, and where she could not go. He began to encourage her to disa.s.sociate herself from her friends because they were immature and stupid. He began encouraging her to drink more and more alcohol.

The judge recounts in some detail how Bernardo began insisting on f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o, then a.n.a.l s.e.x, by late spring 1988. Karla obliged him. Also to please Bernardo, she wore a dog collar during s.e.x and would repeat at his direction: "My name is Karla. I am seventeen years old. I am your little c.o.c.ksucker. I am your little c.u.n.t. I am your little s.l.u.t."

As he progressively reduced the once-lively h.o.m.olka into an obedient s.e.x chattel, Bernardo also intensified the violence he inflicted as the Scarborough Rapist. By autumn 1988, he'd committed at least eight rapes. In November, stumped Metro Toronto police detectives sent the Scarborough Rapist file to the BSU, where newly arrived agent Gregg McCrary was a.s.signed to do the profile.

When it was completed, McCrary and then unit chief John Douglas traveled together to Toronto as a team to consult with local authorities. Roy did not directly a.s.sist in their a.n.a.lysis, or in the police investigation.

McCrary correctly pegged the UNSUB's age as early twenties, and was accurate as well in surmising that the Scarborough Rapist lived at home with his parents. He also believed that the violence would lead inexorably to murder.

It did, although in retrospect Bernardo's depredations could have been curtailed. After a composite sketch of the Scarborough Rapist was published in Toronto in late May 1990, a female acquaintance tipped the Metro police that Paul Bernardo bore a close resemblance to the drawing.

In November, Bernardo was interviewed by the police, and voluntarily provided samples of saliva, blood, and hair for DNA fingerprinting. Not until February 1993, however, were the police informed by the Toronto Center of Forensic Sciences that Bernardo and the Scarborough Rapist were one and the same person.

In an official review of the Bernardo investigation, Ontario justice Archie Campbell pointed out that had the collected specimens been tested within ninety days as they should have, "it is clear these rapes and murders could have been prevented."

Certainly Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French might have been spared.

On June 15, 1991, Bernardo abducted the fourteen-year-old Mahaffy and took her to the Port Dalhousie house he shared with h.o.m.olka. Both Paul and Karla s.e.xually a.s.saulted the teen. Bernardo then strangled Mahaffy.

The next day in his bas.e.m.e.nt workshop, Paul dismembered Leslie and partially encased her severed remains in molds of Kwik Mix concrete. He then enlisted Karla's a.s.sistance in disposing of the weighted parts in Lake Gibson, near the h.o.m.olka family residence in St. Catharines.

Canoeists discovered Bernardo's grisly handiwork on Sat.u.r.day, June 29. On the same day just a few miles away, Paul and Karla were married in the village of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

On Thursday afternoon, April 16, 1992, Ken and Barbie kidnapped fifteen-year-old Kristen French from a church school parking lot, and drove her to their house at 57 Bayview Drive in Port Dalhousie, just as Paul had brought Leslie Mahaffy home.

The girl was kept for four days and subjected to a marathon of physical, s.e.xual, and emotional abuse before Bernardo strangled her. Karla bathed and douched Kristen's broken body. Then she and Paul drove in the night to nearby Burlington, Ontario, where they dumped Kristen along a roadside drainage ditch not far from where Leslie Mahaffy was buried.

"He told me that he decided that he wanted to put the body in Burlington close to where Leslie was buried," Karla later testified, "because he wanted to confuse the police into believing the killer came from Burlington."

Fearing finally for her own life, Karla h.o.m.olka broke away from Paul Bernardo in January 1993 and went to the authorities with her story. A plea bargain was arranged. Karla would testify against Paul, and would serve two concurrent twelve-year sentences for manslaughter. One explicitly worded condition of the agreement firmly prohibits h.o.m.olka from discussing her case with the media on pain of having the deal revoked.

Paul Bernardo was arrested in February 1993.

Since there was almost nothing to tie Bernardo to the three homicides except for h.o.m.olka's testimony, the police realized that their search of the house in Port Dalhousie would be critical to uncovering whatever physical evidence of the murders might remain. And since any items seized in such searches generally must be specified in the warrant itself-or they can't be used in court against the defendant-the local authorities wanted expert advice on the types of physical evidence that s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts might keep around the house.

They again contacted Gregg McCrary, who recommended to the Canadians' attention "The s.e.xually s.a.d.i.s.tic Criminal and His Offenses," a report on the survey of thirty criminal s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts Roy had undertaken with Dr. Dietz and Janet Warren of the Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.

One of the study's key findings was how meticulously some s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts maintain records.

Of the thirty s.a.d.i.s.tic offenders included in the survey, more than half kept records of their crimes as a means of reliving them. "Although some have shared these records with crime partners," wrote Hazelwood and his coauthors, "they are otherwise their most secret possessions, intended to be seen by no one else."

Easily the cleverest of the record-keeping s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.ts Hazelwood studied was Gerard John Schaefer, a onetime Florida policeman suspected of at least twenty-nine gruesome slayings. The Florida newspapers called him the "s.e.x Beast."

Schaefer wrote that he kidnapped hitchhikers, whom he drove to remote, selected locations deep within the Florida swamps. There, he'd set up a stepladder under a tree limb, and direct the girls and women at gunpoint to mount the ladder, nude. In this humiliating posture, they were told to drink beer and urinate, which Schaefer enjoyed watching.

(Paul Bernardo videotaped his victims as they urinated, too.) Shaefer placed a noose over the victim's neck, threw the rope over the tree limb, attached the other end to his car's front b.u.mper, put the vehicle in reverse, and backed away slowly until the noose lifted the woman from the ladder and she was hanged to death.

He'd have s.e.x with her dead body, then bury her nearby. He'd also repeatedly return to the scene, disinter the victim, and have s.e.x with her corpse.

Schaefer's innovative scheme for capturing the experience, and legally protecting his record of it, began with a visit to a psychiatrist. He confided to the doctor he was having horrible fantasies of hanging women and then having s.e.x with them. As Schaefer hoped, the doctor decided it would be therapeutic if he wrote out his fantasies, which he delightedly did in detail.

The resulting doc.u.ments-later discovered in his possessions-richly recounted Schaefer's deviant adventures, but were covered by doctor-patient confidentiality. With one exception they could never be used as legal evidence against him. Schaefer, who went to prison for a noncapital shooting homicide, was murdered there by another inmate.

As detailed as a s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t's audiotaped, videotaped, photographed, and written records are, rarely do they depict his victim's actual murder. Hazelwood believes the omission is conscious. "The act never completely fulfills the fantasy," he says. "If the guy shows the killing, it might spoil the fantasy, and fantasies always are perfect."

In an investigative application of this rule, Hazelwood once was called by a West Coast police department to consult on a highly unusual case.

A businessman had collapsed and died during a convention. Toxicological tests determined his cause of death was an overdose of PCP, or angel dust. A search of the man's hotel room turned up a forty-five-minute audioca.s.sette in which he described in detail the gruesome murder of two unnamed teenage couples. The question police put to Roy Hazelwood was simple: Was this story on the tape fact or fantasy?

"On the tape he says he quickly killed the females in both crimes," says Hazelwood. "So it's obvious his orientation was toward the males. He says, 'When I had Jack on the bed I wish I'd put a plastic sheet beneath his body, because when I cut his throat his blood saturated and ruined the sheets and pillows.'

"With the other male victim it was, 'I wished I'd stabbed him in the kidney, rather than the throat, because he died too quickly.'

"Fantasies are always perfect. This wasn't perfect. I told the police department that in my opinion this was not a fantasy tape."

Although the Toronto police inserted the appropriate language into their search warrant for the Port Dalhousie house-and Karla told them repeatedly of the videotapes Paul had made and how she was sure he'd kept them-repeated searches of the residence failed to find them. As it turned out, Bernardo's lawyer, acting on his client's directions, retrieved the ca.s.settes in early May 1993, and didn't produce them until September 1994.

Between Karla h.o.m.olka's January 1993 break with her husband and Bernardo's arrest in February, Inspector Ron Mackay of the RCMP was summoned from Ottawa to Toronto. In a case so obviously outside the bounds of customary criminal behavior, local investigators wanted input from an expert in aberrant offenders.

Mackay had recently received from Hazelwood a draft of his compliant victim survey, which Roy was preparing for publication that spring with coauthors Dietz and Warren.

When he arrived in Toronto and learned why he'd been summoned, Mackay immediately thought of Hazelwood's unpublished study.

"I could see the application in this case," Mackay recalls. "I tracked Roy down in Tennessee and got his permission to share that unpublished paper with the investigation, because of their operational needs, so they could better understand what they were dealing with."

Mackay also recommended the investigation reach out to Peter Collins of Toronto's Clarke Inst.i.tute of Psychiatry, a consulting forensic psychiatrist to the RCMP's Violent Crimes a.n.a.lysis Branch, who'd also worked cases with Hazelwood. Collins, too, had just read a draft of "Compliant Victims of the s.e.xual s.a.d.i.s.t," and agreed that the paper would shed light on Karla h.o.m.olka's puzzling relationship with Paul Bernardo.

The study would play a pivotal role in persuading the police (and later, prosecutors) that while Karla h.o.m.olka was hardly an innocent, her husband was the motive force behind their crimes. "It was thought," says Collins, "after everyone acquainted themselves with Roy's work, that had h.o.m.olka never met Bernardo at that Howard Johnson she never would have played a part in any such crimes. She was his perfect victim."

Hazelwood later also informally advised Bernardo's prosecutors via their lead forensic psychiatrist, Steve Hucker. "We were talking one day and he said, 'Guess what?' " Hucker remembers. " 'There's another case just like yours that happened in Kentucky, and there's just been a book published about it.' "

Mel Ignatow (p.r.o.nounced Ig-NAH-toe), aged fifty, was a salesman for an import-export company in Louisville, Kentucky. Pretty, brown-eyed Brenda Sue Shaefer, thirty-six, was his fiancee.

In late September 1988, Shaefer's four-year-old Buick Regal was found abandoned along a stretch of Interstate 64 in St. Matthews, a district within the urban Louisville area.

There was no sign of a struggle in the car, and police discounted the possibility of a random attack. Yet they also could not find the victim, who was presumed dead. Nor could they generate a case against their prime suspect, Ignatow himself.

Then in January 1990, Ignatow's former girlfriend, Mary Ann Sh.o.r.e, came forth to say Brenda Shaefer had been murdered, and that Sh.o.r.e knew all about it because the killing had occurred in Sh.o.r.e's house, and she'd been there when it happened.

After agreeing, as had Karla h.o.m.olka, to a reduced charge and limited prison time in exchange for her testimony, Sh.o.r.e told investigators how Ignatow had brought the highly inhibited Shaefer to her house for a "s.e.x therapy" session. As Ignatow alternated with Sh.o.r.e at his 35mm camera, recording each step, Shaefer was made to pose in a series of progressively more demeaning postures, from full-frontal upright to her knees, head bent to the floor.

Then the entire sequence of photos was exactly repeated in the nude.

Shaefer next was tied to the coffee table, where Ignatow raped her a.n.a.lly. Then she was taken to Sh.o.r.e's bed, tied again, and raped again, repeatedly. Ignatow finally killed her with chloroform administered to her mouth with a cloth, just as Karla h.o.m.olka, at Paul Bernardo's instruction, had dosed her sister Tammy with the animal anesthetic.

Although Mary Ann Sh.o.r.e bolstered the credibility of her story by leading investigators to Brenda's grave behind her house (which she said Ignatow had dug in advance of Shaefer's "s.e.x therapy"), the photos she and Ignatow took did not surface, and a jury in December of 1991 chose not to believe her testimony.

Ignatow went free.

The next month, local U.S. attorney Alan Sears. .h.i.t on a new scheme for bringing the killer to justice. Sears couldn't charge Ignatow with murder again, because of the const.i.tutional protection against double jeopardy. But Ignatow earlier had sworn to a federal grand jury that he was innocent of murdering Brenda Shaefer. If a federal jury could be persuaded that he in fact was guilty, then perjury charges might stick.

In January 1992, a three-count federal perjury indictment was handed up against Ignatow.