Part 27 (1/2)

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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 dealers.h.i.+ps, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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.