Part 27 (2/2)

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 relations.h.i.+p 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.

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