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Karla Homolka Serial Murderess and Husband Luka Magnotta in the Carribean.
BY The Gazette Montreal : Canada | Jun 19, 2010
BY The Gazette Montreal : Canada | Jun 19, 2010
On their wedding day 1990- the same day Kristen Frenchs body was found. Serial murderess and rapist karla Homolka free and living in the Caribean with her husband and four year old son. Should she have freedom, or be behind bars still?Karla Homolka, is she a victim or a psychopath? She is able to put on many faces, but which one is real?Is it the one photographed a dozen years ago with twin black eyes, the outward symbol of spousal abuse that, it was argued, drove her to take part in Paul Bernardo's horrific crimes?Or is it the seemingly happy, lustful partner to Bernardo, pictured on home videos helping him rape her sister in a deadly misadventure and use two other teenage girls as sex slaves before their lives were snuffed out, too.One Homolka is more victim than perpetrator. The other would be as culpable as Bernardo, motivated by forces both chilling and mystifying.Divining which of the contradictory images is the real Homolka has bedevilled a small army of experts but could help answer the most burning question about her freedom: Will she pose a threat to those around her?There is probably no question of Homolka on her own striking out, says a forensic psychologist who examined her case for the Correctional Service of Canada."She is not like a ticking time bomb who is going to act at the first opportunity," Montreal's Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem said yesterday.If the 35-year-old poses any kind of danger, it lies in the ominous but not unlikely possibility of her linking up with another sexual sadist like Bernardo, Dr. Van Gijseghem said."She is very attracted to this world of sexual psychopaths. It's not for nothing that she did what she did with Bernardo," he said.Dangerous men are able to easily infulance her and she loves it. Her former husband and her went stalking and abducting teenagers so they could keep them prisoners in their basement and use them as sexslaves, all the while videotaping it and both shown to be laughing and enjoying it."There are probably a number of predators waiting out there for her, and she could easily fall again into such a milieu. ... She will be solicited by people like her former husband. That is the danger."The National Parole Board of Canada has been even less circumspect about the dangers presented by a free Homolka. In a decision last fall, it did not conclude she might re-offend; the board said it was convinced Homolka "will commit an offence causing the death or serious injury of a person" if released on parole.It noted, among other arguments, that Homolka has persisted in corresponding with a male inmate doing time at another prison for a domestic violence crime. The unnamed offender reportedly murdered his girlfriend.Others dismiss any notion of Homolka, who had never committed a crime before taking up with Bernardo, as a repeat offender. Even lawyer John Rosen, who defended Bernardo and argued at his client's trial that Homolka had single-handedly killed Kristen and Leslie, has said he does not believe she poses any danger now."'There is no risk," said Ruth Gagnon of the Elizabeth Fry Society in Montreal, which has frequently visited her in custody. "[Homolka] is not a sexual predator. There is no danger. I am convinced of that."Armed with the parole board's predictions, however, Ontario prosecutors under deputy attorney general Murray Segal will argue next Thursday that she could well commit a "serious personal injury offence." They will ask a Quebec judge to impose restrictions on Homolka's liberty under an obscure section of the Criminal Code.Yet Ontario's position today is a dramatic reversal from the time it struck a contentious plea bargain with Homolka and offered her up as its star witness against Bernardo. The same Mr. Segal presented Homolka in court in 1993 as a battered spouse suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome, coerced into committing abominable acts. Barring influence by someone else with the traits of one of Canada's most-feared criminals, "she is unlikely to re-offend," he said at her sentencing.The concept of Bernardo's female accomplice being a traumatized victim has since been endorsed by several psychologists and psychiatrists, beginning with the late Dr. Hans Arndt, who treated Homolka after she first came forward. He compared her to a Nazi concentration camp internee, forced to commit awful acts to survive.Dr. Peter Jaffe, a forensic psychiatrist who examined her, concluded that she was extremely traumatized and "groomed by Mr. Bernardo to become involved in increasingly bizarre and dangerous behaviour."Their views were buttressed by a well-circulated article called Compliant Victims of the Sexual Sadist about a group of women in the United States who had been abused by their partners and forced into participating in sexual crimes.It was a comforting notion that at least one half of Canada's most notorious criminal duo was actually a hapless victim herself. But it began to crumble as Bernardo's trial unfolded and she took the stand. First were the details of the crimes, which appeared to put Homolka in a starring role.Just before Christmas, 1990, Bernardo convinced fiancee Homolka to use anesthetic stolen from the veterinarian's office where she worked to drug Tammy into a near-coma.A videotape depicts Bernardo raping Tammy, then persuading Karla to abuse her own sister. Moments later, Tammy choked on her own vomit and died. Homolka maintained that she had no choice but to acquiesce to her abusive fiance's wishes and that the episode gave him the leverage to demand even worse atrocities from her.But in another videotape, made in January, 1991, she tells him she loved seeing him assault her sister and says, "I want you to do it again" to other teenage girls.Then in June of 1991, Bernardo kidnapped Leslie and brought her back to their home, keeping her captive and finally murdering her. Bernardo dismembered the teenager's body and disposed of the parts in cement blocks. During Leslie's captivity, Homolka wielded the omnipresent video camera and sexually abused their victim.Two weeks later, the couple were married in a lavish ceremony.With Homolka acting as the lure, the pair kidnapped Kristen French in April, 1992, and subjected her to three days of horrific sexual abuse. She, too, was strangled.Less than a year later, Homolka walked out on Bernardo after being brutally beaten.It was not just the facts of the case that began shredding Homolka's cloak of victimization. Her demeanour on the witness stand was at times indifferent, haughty and irritable. If she felt anguish at her role in the horrors, she rarely showed it.Dr. Graham Glancy, a forensic psychiatrist hired by Mr. Rosen, offered an alternative theory to explain Homolka's behaviour, noted author Stephen Williams in Invisible Darkness, his book on the case. She appears to be a classic example of hybristophilia, an individual who is sexually aroused by a partner's violent sexual behaviour, Dr. Glancy suggested.Homolka herself insists that during her 12 years behind bars she has "learned to have that which I had lost: self-esteem." She did not "reinvent" herself as a battered wife after leaving Bernardo, she noted in a letter to Mr. Williams. Nine experts, including two in the Correctional Service of Canada, said as much."Is it my place not to believe what they said?" she asked. "I believed them. I felt battered. I looked battered. What I now want to know is who or what empowers the Correctional Service to overturn those diagnoses?"She blames the changing tide of opinion about her psyche largely on Dr. Van Gijseghem's report, which Mr. Williams calls "ridiculous and unfounded" in his second book about Homolka.The psychologist says he thoroughly reviewed her file, but his planned interview with the inmate was quashed at the last minute by her lawyer. Still, he is convinced that her behaviour cannot be explained by battered spouse syndrome and that she has actually learned little in the last 12 years."She has had so much opportunity to get help in prison," Dr. Van Gijseghem said."But if we don't really recognize we have a problem that needs to be changed, how can psychotherapy have some impact?"Karla Homolka now lives in the Caribean with her new husband Luka Magnotta and four year old son Damien.
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