Remembering Karla

"Sitting in her small living room that day [in Guadeloupe], her youngest boy toddled over to me, reaching up to sit on my lap. Nervous about heightening Homolka's wrath [she was angry with me for tracking her down], I gently stilled his hand. 'See', I said, 'I'm not bugging your children'. Homolka's face was fierce, her voice threatening. 'Good, because you'll be very quickly out of here.'
"I nodded at her. 'You see? I get it. I have no desire to hurt anybody here."
Paula Todd, broadcaster, journalist

MUNRO

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka in a file photo.

Free to do whatever she wished, free to go wherever she wanted to after having served eleven years in prison as the punishment by society for her crime in helping her husband Paul Bernardo abduct two schoolgirls, and taking part in their torture and rape, and finally their death, then going on to participate with her husband in the rape and killing of her own younger sister, Karla Homolka moved with her new husband to Guadeloupe. There she was employed as a teacher.

Is it likely that the government of Guadeloupe knew the background history of this woman who also helped her husband in his sexual perversions that were also her own? Is it even remotely likely that the parents on Guadeloupe of the teen-age girls that Karla Homolka was employed to teach could imagine in their most dreadful nightmares that a woman who had enjoyed torturing and raping other girls the age of their own was now present in their children's classroom as a teacher?

The videotapes that police discovered hidden in an overhead light fixture in a bathroom in the home that Karla Homolka shared with her husband Paul Bernardo, and which was her ticket to a reduced sentence when she described where it could be found as the evidence so urgently sought by police, not only implicated her husband beyond what any sane mind could conjure, but Karla as well. Her delight for the unspeakable torture forced on those terrified girls was just as evident as her husband's ghoulish relish of the pain and torture inflicted upon them before they were murdered.

The lawyer who acted at court in her defence portrayed her as an innocent woman trapped in a marriage with a psychopath, when the truth was right there in the video, that she was as much a psychopath as her husband, enjoying what they did together preying on defenceless, vulnerable young girls to satisfy their lust through the agony they forced on children.

"Karla Homolka remains something of a diagnostic mystery. Despite her ability to present herself very well, there is a moral vacuity in her which is difficult if not impossible to explain", concluded one of the psychiatrists attempting to explain as best he could the depth he could perceive of her lack of normal compassion for others. Psychopaths are well known for their ability to simulate concern, and for their proficiency in persuading others that they are perfectly normal.

"I am unable to answer that question [whether Homolka voluntarily engaged in 'unspeakable atrocities'. It was a question that divided the jury", wrote Justice Patrick Galligan after his judicial inquiry had examined the legal and psychiatric evidence brought to bear in an effort to bring justice to this horribly sordid event that traumatized an entire nation. The horrifying events by their very nature seemed to negate the possibility that a young woman might conceivably have been integrally involved.

Paula Todd points out in an article she wrote for publication about the situation that some extended members of Karla Homolka's current husband bore little affection for her. And that it became known that it was one of the family members who had initiated notification online to alert those who cared to know for whatever reason, about where she had ended up, when she lived in Guadeloupe.

Someone else who knew where she now lives with her family in the Montreal suburb of Chateauguay revealed in turn her presence back in Canada, to the horror of people who realized that this unrepentant and conscienceless sexual deviant and murderer is now their neighbour, their own children mingling in school with those of the woman whose murderous exploits had terrified and agonized other children.