Karla Homolka

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Karla Leanne Homolka (born May 4, 1970 in Port Credit , Ontario ) is a Canadian serial killer who, together with her husband Paul Kenneth Bernardo, raped and killed several young girls. The two came to be known as Ken and Barbie of Murder and Mayhem and gave the Canadian press the opportunity to write spectacular trial reports.

The murders

In 1987 Karla Homolka met her future husband Bernardo at the age of 17. By then, Bernardo had raped at least one woman in Scarborough (now part of Toronto ). This was the beginning of a series of rapes; the then unknown perpetrator was soon referred to by the press as "Scarborough Rapist". He almost always attacked his victims from behind, so most of them couldn't see his face. After one of the victims saw his face and gave a good description to the police, a phantom was released. A few hundred citizens came forward who believed they knew the suspect. This included several references to Bernardo. In November 1990 Bernardo was questioned by the police; blood and saliva samples were also taken for DNA analysis . However, these could not be examined immediately, as DNA examinations were still a relatively new method at the time that could only be carried out by a few laboratories.

In the course of their relationship, Bernardo blamed Homolka for not having been a virgin at the time they met. Homolka tried to appease Bernardo by offering him her 15-year-old sister, Tammy, as a "replacement", since she was still untouched in contrast to Homolka. Bernardo was to receive Tammy as a "Christmas present" in December 1990. At that time, Bernardo was living with Homolka's family in St. Catharines . After everyone else in her family had gone to bed, Homolka added sleeping pills to her sister's drink on the late evening of December 23, 1990. Homolka organized the medication through her work as a veterinary assistant. After Tammy passed out, Bernardo raped her. Homolka videotaped the crime. To make sure that Tammy didn't wake up while she was raped, Homolka held a cloth over her mouth and nose that had been soaked in the anesthetic halothane . Homolka also assaulted her sister, which in turn was recorded by Bernardo with the video camera. But while the act was still Tammy vomited and choked on her vomit. This was Homolkas and Bernardo's first, albeit unintentional, killing. The act initially went undetected, as the drugs in Tammy's body were not noticed during the autopsy and it was assumed that an accident was under the influence of alcohol.

In early 1991, Bernardo and Homolka moved into a rented house in Port Dalhousie , a district of St. Catharines. Over the next several months, Homolka invited a friend of her late sister, Tammy, who was drugged and raped the same way but survived the act without remembering.

On June 15, 1991, Bernardo abducted 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy from Burlington to his home, where she was detained for several days and repeatedly raped and tortured by him and Homolka . This act was also recorded with the video camera. When Bernardo got tired of Mahaffys, Karla strangled her and dismembered the body in the basement with the help of a chainsaw . She poured the body parts in cement and dumped them in the Lake Gibson Reservoir .

On June 29, 1991 Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka married. At the same time, the body parts of Leslie Mahaffy were found in Lake Gibson because the water level had meanwhile been lowered.

The second murder victim, 15-year-old Kristen French, was abducted by the couple on April 16, 1992 on their way back from school in St. Catharines and held, raped and tortured for several days, which was again recorded on video. Homolka disposed of the teenager's body in a ditch after she strangled the girl.

In court

In February 1993 the police had the evaluations of the saliva samples taken more than two years earlier. From this it emerged that Paul Bernardo was most likely the Scarborough rapist . Bernardo was arrested on February 17, 1993. When the house was searched, the video tapes with the recordings of the crimes were initially not found.

Karla Homolka had already separated from Bernardo in January 1993 because he had beaten her to the point of hospitalization. In the course of the investigation, Homolka agreed to cooperate with the police and public prosecutor's office and was also ready to testify in court. She also confessed to being complicit in her sister's death.

Without the videotapes, there was little evidence against Bernardo at the time to indict him for the crimes against Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, so prosecutors needed Homolka's help. She posed as one of her husband's numerous sex slaves and claimed to have been humiliated and abused. In return, she escaped murder charges, pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter, and was sentenced on July 5, 1993 to twelve years in prison. Such agreements, in which one accused pleads guilty of a minor offense and in return testifies against another accused, are common in Canada and the USA .

In September 1994, the videotapes that had since emerged were handed over to the public prosecutor's office. In the videos, Homolka is seen as an active perpetrator and not as a dependent abused. However, a new conviction for the same offense was not possible under Canadian law, even on the basis of the new evidence.

Bernardo was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders and rapes in a spectacular summer 1995 trial in Toronto in which Homolka testified for two weeks and the videotapes were shown to the jury. Release on parole is possible after 25 years at the earliest. However, Bernardo has been classified by the court as a "dangerous offender", which means that he will likely remain in prison for the rest of his life. Bernardo admitted to raping 14 other women. The police assume that there will be more murders, but they have never been proven.

Public perception

Karla Homolka's mild sentence was very controversial among the Canadian population, especially after the videotapes came to light. Your cooperation with the public prosecutor's office was described in the press as the "devil's pact". She had to serve her sentence to the last day, which is unusual in Canada. Most prisoners are released on parole after two-thirds of their term of imprisonment, and with good conduct after one third. Before she was released, the court ruled that she was at risk of continuing to commit crimes. Restrictions were imposed on her by the court; for example, she should report to the police regularly and inform the authorities of her whereabouts at all times.

On July 4, 2005, she was released from prison, which was besieged by journalists. Nevertheless, she managed to leave the prison unnoticed; shortly thereafter she gave an interview to Radio Canada . She has since lived near Montreal and changed her looks. The restrictions decided by the court were lifted again in a higher instance; an official change of her name was not initially approved.

After her release from prison, she was tracked down by reporters several times: the first time in August 2005 by the tabloid Toronto Sun after a tip from her employer, another time in the summer of 2006 by a Global TV team that recorded the encounter and later broadcast it on the news . In early 2007, she gave birth to a son in Montreal. She married her child's father at an unknown date.

On December 14, 2007, TVA, a French-speaking television station, announced that Homolka had left Canada a few weeks earlier with her son and new husband Thierry Bordelais and now lives on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe , her husband's home.

Cultural references to Karla Homolka

literature

  • Burnside, Scott and Alan Cairns. Deadly Innocence . Grand Central Publishing, Warner Books edition (1995) ISBN 0446601543 .
  • Pron, Nick. Lethal Marriage: The Uncensored Truth Behind the Crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka . Seal Books (2005). ISBN 077042936X .
  • Williams, Stephen, Invisible Darkness, The Strange Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka , Little, Brown and Company Limited (1996), ISBN 0-316-94137-9
  • Williams, Stephen, Karla, A Pact with the Devil , Cantos International (2003), ISBN 2-89594-000-2
  • Benecke, Mark, methods of murder. New spectacular criminal cases - told by the most famous criminal biologist in the world , Bastei Lübbe (2002), ISBN 978-3-404-60545-3 , pp. 204-256
  • Ketchum, Jack, Übler Abschaum , Festa Verlag (2020), private print without ISBN

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Homolka moves to Caribbean ( Memento from September 11, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ), St. Catharines Standard from December 15, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Homolka, Karla
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Homolka, Karla Leanne (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH May 4th 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH Port Credit , Ontario , Canada