Karla Holmolka and Paul Bernardo:
Behind the Headlines
December 23, 1990, was the big day — Tammy's deflowering. Paul used his new video camcorder to take videos of Mr. and Mrs. Homolka, their daughters, Karla, Tammy and Lori and the Christmas decorations in the house.
Paul plied Tammy with drinks, laced with the sedative Halcion. The effects of the drugs and alcohol were swift and Tammy was out cold on the couch in no time. When the other members of the household went up to bed, Karla and Paul started to work on Tammy. Paul held the camera on Tammy while he raped her, leaving Karla to keep the halothane-laden rag over her sister's face. Then he ordered Karla to make sexual advances to her sleeping sister.
Jane, the Wedding Gift
Karla was obsessed with Paul's happiness. Her greatest fear was that she would not be able to hold onto this wild and thrilling man who was to become her husband. When he would become bored or distracted, she would either do something to excite him or find another person for him to get excited about. Paul harped continually that Tammy was no longer available to him for his sexual pleasure and blamed Karla for causing her death. Karla searched for a replacement for Tammy — someone very young and virginal.
Karla knew just the right person, a teenager we'll call Jane, who looked very much like Karla's dead sister, Tammy. .Karla and Jane spent the afternoon together and went to the mall where they tried on cloths. Jane told karla that she was still virgin.
Karla got to check out the fifteen year old completely naked as they tried on the clothes.  Karl noted that her budding A-cup breasts were filling out her training bra and she had only the lightest wisps of blonde pubic hair but she was still essentially bald.   Fifteen-year-old Jane would be Karla's wedding gift to Paul.
Jane idolized Karla as a beautiful, sophisticated role model and gratefully accepted Karla's invitation to the Bernardos' new home they rented at 57 Bayview. The first evening, Karla took Jane to dinner and spent hours talking to her and plying her with sweet alcoholic drinks, laced with Halcion tablets. Jane passed out and slept deeply.
Once Jane was soundly asleep, Karla called Paul over for his surprise gift Karla gave Paul Jane to rape. How delighted he was when he saw how much Jane resembled Tammy. He was a bit concerned that Karla was using the same drug that killed Tammy to subdue Jane, but Karla convinced him that she was in control of the situation this time.
Once they undressed Jane, Paul videotaped Karla as she performed cunylingus on the sleeping girl.
Then Paul raped the girl for close to 20 minute taking her virginity culminating with Paul ejaculating directly into the teenager’s vagina. With that accomplished and memorialized in the videotape, he moved on to his favorite fun — a brutal kind of anal sex. Fortunately for Jane, she was so drugged that she did not wake up during the whole disgusting ordeal.
Karla was left to clean the blood off the fifteen-year-old girl and put her to bed for the night. The next morning, Jane, who was very sick to her stomach and understandably sore, met Paul — she thought for the first time. She had no idea what had really happened to her.
While Paul seemed very grateful for the gift of Jane's virginity and was continually amazed at the things Karla would do for him, he was having second thoughts about marrying her. She was, after all, getting old, having already passed her twenty-first birthday and she was a far cry from being the virgin for which he lusted.
After their marriage, Karla and Paul Bernardo lived in their home on Bayview in St. Catharines.  Paul had begun augmenting his income by smuggling cigarettes across   the border and needed the stolen license plates to disguise his frequent visits across the American-Canadian line. It was the need for a stolen license plate that brought him into contact with his first murder victim, Leslie Mahaffy.

Leslie Mahaffy
Leslie Mahaffy was a troubled youngster. Her strong, independent personality seemed to be at the root of the problem, which manifested itself in ignoring her curfews, engaging in promiscuous sex, skipping school and even shoplifting. Her parents responded by getting tough on Leslie when she broke the rules.
On Friday, June 14, 1991, Leslie went out for the evening with her friends and stayed out well past her curfew. At 2 A.M., she found herself locked out of her house. She called her girlfriend to ask her if she could spend the night with her, but the girlfriend didn't think that her mother would allow it at that hour. Leslie told her girlfriend that she was going back home to wake up her parents.
Leslie had actually gone back to her home to see if there was any way to get in without waking her parents. With the worst possible luck imaginable, she encountered Paul Bernardo who was prowling around the neighborhood looking for license plates to steal.
He pulled a knife on Leslie Mahaffy and forced her to go in his car. Paul restrained the girl’s hands with tape and partially undressed her. Paul digitally penetrated her anally and vaginally while sitting in the car. Paul had Leslie orally copulate him in the car. He ejaculated into her mouth after only a few seconds.
Paul took his catch home.
While Karla slept, he began to videotape the fourteen-year-old Leslie naked and blindfolded. When Karla woke up, she was very angry that Paul had used their best champagne glasses to entertain his new toy. Finally, Karla came around and started being the obedient wife that Paul demanded.
Paul gave Karla elaborate instructions on how to make love to Leslie. Paul directed Karla to tie the girl spread eagle on the edge of the mattress.  Karla was instructed to kneel down between the girl’s legs and to suck Leslie’s clitoris into her mouth while she penetrated Leslie’s anus with a dildo.   
It was the voice of a director in an important film. Every moment had to be just perfect for the videotape he was making. After the prelude with Karla, Paul went in for the rough stuff, while his wife held the camera.
The brute force of his anal penetration caused Leslie to scream hysterically in pain. Mahaffy was restrained face down on the mattress as he violently raped her up her anus.
 The rough stuff escalated, hour by hour over the course of four days.  Paul took to shocking the girl’s vagina with an electrical wire as she screamed and begged for mercy.    and Leslie died.
On the evening June 29, 1991, a man and his wife were canoeing on Lake Gibson when they came across a concrete block with some pieces of animal flesh encased in it. Later, he went back to the spot and, with the help of a fisherman, pulled out the concrete block and looked at it closely. Inside the block was the calf and foot of a young woman.
Soon, the place was alive with cops, who found a total of five concrete blocks that had been dumped there in the shallow water. Police theorized that whoever dumped this body in Lake Gibson was not familiar with the area or he would have dumped the concrete blocks over the bridge where the deep water may have kept them a secret forever.
Not long afterwards, the torso of a young woman was found in the water. The body parts that had been found in the concrete block had been cut from her torso with a power saw. Leslie's distinctive braces provided the clues to her identification.
The Second Murder?
Paul deprived of his eccentric entertainment was prone to ill humor. This simply would not do. Karla, the ever-dutiful wife called Jane back into service. But Jane was far from the ideal sex slave. First of all, the girl upset them both by refusing to let Paul have intercourse with her (Jane thought she was still a virgin). Oral sex was all she would agree to. Then she told her riding instructor about Paul and the instructor told Jane's mother. The result was that Paul and Karla had less opportunity to enjoy themselves with Jane. One night, things got out of hand again with the halothane and Jane stopped breathing for awhile. This scared the daylights out of Paul and Karla.
Not only that, Paul was become annoyed with his new wife. He questioned her competence with the halothane. Karla was frantic. She had to do something to put some new romance back into their relationship.
For a while, another willing girl satisfied their needs, but eventually she moved back to Youngstown, Ohio, and the Bernardos were bereft once again for entertainment. This always created tensions in their marriage tensions that were unbearable to Karla.
November 30, 1991, pretty and vivacious fourteen-year-old Terri Anderson disappeared Six months later she was found in the water at Port Dalhousie. The medical examiner saw no evidence of foul play, despite the difficulties of determining such factors in a body that had been in the water for six months. The coroner ruled that her death was by drowning, probably as a result of drinking beer and taking LSD.
The coroner's ruling was controversial in light of what had happened to Leslie Mahaffy. Whether or not the attractive youngster was another of Karla and Paul's victims is still not certain.

 Kristen French

Kristen French
On April 16, 1992, a very popular and attractive teenager named Kristen French was abducted from a church parking lot. Karla had lured the pretty girl over to their car on the pretense of asking directions. When Kristen stood by the car looking at Karla's map, Paul forced the girl into the backseat with his knife.
At the outset, both Paul and Karla knew that Kristen would have to die. She had clearly seen them, knew where they lived and had seen their dog. Even so, they didn't want Kristen to figure this out, particularly since she was bigger than Karla was and fairly strong despite her youth.
Kristen, who was a smart girl, did everything she could to cooperate with this depraved couple and their outrageous and humiliating demands. She believed that cooperation was her only chance for survival. The ordeal became worse and worse. The more she cooperated, the more sadistic Paul became. The following activity, found in Williams' book, was taken from the videotaped evidence.
"'I'm going to piss on you, okay? Then I'm going to shit on you.' Paul said in a whisper... Kristen did not move, even when he slapped her face with his semi-erect penis.
"'Don't make me mad. Don't make me hurt you,' he said, urging her to smile when he rubbed his groin into her face.
"'Don't worry, I won't piss in your face.'

"Finally, he stood over her and urinated. Then he moved. Turning his buttocks into her face, he squatted over her face and defecated on her mouth.
"'You're a f--king piece of shit. But I like you,' he told her. 'You look good covered in piss.'"
The indignities went on for a day or two, all meticulously captured on video for the future enjoyment of the newlyweds. Then came the final and worst indignity of all for Kristen French, but her death was not captured on film.
On April 30, 1992, Kristen's remains were found in a ditch. Her naked body had not been dismembered like Leslie's, leading the investigators to erroneously conclude that the murders of the two teenagers were not connected.
Amazing Evidence
On February 19, police executed the search warrants for Paul and Karla's house and found an amazing amount of evidence. Paul had a written description of every one of the Scarborough rapes plus an extensive library of books and videos on sexual deviation, pornography and serial killers.
The police also found one brief home video that indicated that there had been more than one lascivious person in the Bernardo household. Quite explicitly, the short video showed Karla as an enthusiastic lesbian in sexual acts with two other women. A week later, George Walker and Murray Segal, a plea-bargain specialist for the attorney general, discussed the deal for Karla. Karla would get twelve years in prison for each of the two victims, but the sentences would be served concurrently. She would be eligible for parole in a little over three years with good behavior. The government even agreed to contact the parole board on Karla's behalf, pointing out to them the importance of her testimony against Paul. Segal would do what he could to arrange for Karla to serve out her sentence in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison. The trial would be very brief and she would waive her right to a preliminary hearing.
In exchange for this leniency, Karla would agree to tell the absolute truth about her involvement in the crimes and everything she knew about them. Karla agreed unconditionally.
In early March, Karla was checked into a psychiatric hospital for assessment. She was given heavy doses of drugs and insisted on being given even larger doses. Eventually, Karla got up the nerve to write an important letter to her parents:
Dear Mom, Dad and Lori,
This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write and you'll probably all hate me once you read it. I've kept this inside myself for so long and I just can't lie to you any more. Both Paul and I are responsible for Tammy's death. Paul was "in love" with her and wanted to have sex with her. He wanted me to help him. He wanted me to get sleeping pills from work to drug her with. He threatened me and physically and emotionally abused me when I refused. No words I can say can make you understand what he put me through. So stupidly I agreed to do as he said. But something maybe the combination of drugs and the food she ate that night caused her to vomit. I tried so hard to save her. I am so sorry. But no words I can say can bring her back I would gladly give my life for hers. I don't expect you to ever forgive me, for I will never forgive myself.
Karla —XOXO
X-Rated Videos
The trial of Paul Bernardo was delayed for two years after his arrest. One of the reasons for the delay was that Bernardo had placed his first lawyer, Ken Murray, in a very difficult ethical situation. Bernardo had given Murray the videotapes that he and Karla had made of their adventures, believing that by doing so, they would never get into the hands of prosecutors.
However, the prosecutors knew of the videotapes from Karla and had wiretapped Murray's conversations with Bernardo. Eventually, the pressure increased and Murray had to do something about the videotapes in his possession. The videotapes were turned over to the prosecutors and Murray withdrew from the case. Veteran defense lawyer John Rosen took his place as Bernardo's lawyer. This series of activities alone caused a delay of one year in the start of the trial.
In May of 1995, Bernardo's trial began in Judge Patrick LeSage's courtroom with the videotapes as critical pieces of evidence. Bernardo faced two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of forcible confinement, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of performing an indignity on a human body.
For two years, information about the case had been sealed, although sordid details had leaked out in the American press. Copies of newspapers were smuggled into Canada.
Prosecutor Ray Houlahan opened the trial with a full-day story of Karla's life as a victim of the dominating sadist, a brain-washed, frightened accomplice to the most degrading criminal acts.
Crown prosecutor Ray Houlahan began with a segment showing Karla naked, masturbating, with the camera focused on her vagina.

Book cover: Lethal Marriage
Nick Pron in Lethal Marriage describes the electrifying effect the video had on the courtroom: "Gasps of surprise and disgust, perhaps even shock, along with plenty of embarrassed giggles, could be heard throughout the courtroom as the camera lingered on Homolka's exposed body for several minutes as she stimulated herself... For the previous two years, ever since her arrest, Homolka's face had been almost as well known as the prime minister's. She had been seen on television in footage taken at her wedding, with her friends, and at her trialBut few people in the courtroom that day were expecting to see a triple X-rated tape, a close study of the country's most infamous woman in a variety of sexually explicit positions."


Sex Slaves

Sketch of Bernardo in court
It seemed like an odd way for the prosecutor to treat his star witness, however Houlahan explained that the dialog in the videos had been scripted by Bernardo and was a good example of how he forced his will on Karla.
As more of these videotapes of Leslie, Kristen and Jane were shown, the jury was provided with indisputable and powerful evidence of Paul Bernardo's sexual depravity. As if that were not enough, Karla was called to the stand to elaborate on what the jurors had just seen and heard.
What she described in her relationship with Paul was an escalating theme of sexual degradation similar to what Paul had begun with other girlfriends before he met Karla. In Karla, the willing victim, the degradation knew no boundaries. He made her wear a dog's "choke" collar; he inserted a wire bottle into her vagina; and he almost strangled her with a wire cord to satisfy his sadistic fantasies. Paul told her that his choke fantasy was "important to him and it wouldn't hurt anybody." He told her that she was nothing without him and he would call her names, like slut, bitch, and cunt.
When the defense had its turn in the courtroom, John Rosen attacked Karla's credibility. His goal was to show that she was not the victim she portrayed herself to be, but a willing participant in the couple's rape and murder spree.
He was, at least, successful in showing Karla to be a morally vacuous woman with no remorse for her part in these crimes. In particular, Kristen's murder had to be committed at a particular time so that Karla and Paul could spend Easter dinner with Karla's parents. Immediately after Kristen was strangled, Karla left to blow dry her hair. If it was not immediately clear at the trial, it became clear shortly after, that Karla had cleverly manipulated the circumstances of her cooperation with the government to engineer one of the worst deals that the Canadian government had ever made with a criminal witness.
Regardless of Karla's degree of guilt or innocence and the deal she had made with the authorities, it did not save Bernardo from the outrage that he kindled in the minds of the jurors. On September 1, 1995, Bernardo was convicted on all the charges against him regarding the kidnappings, rapes and murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. He also faced trials in the death of Tammy Homolka and the serial rapes in Scarborough. Under Canadian law, Bernardo can apply for parole after twenty-five years in prison, although it is unlikely that he would be successful in any parole bid.
Legal Maneuvers
In February, 2000, as reported by The Toronto Star, Paul Bernardo launched his long-awaited appeal with his legal team accusing Justice Patrick LeSage of evidentiary and procedural mistakes during the 1995 first-degree murder trial for the sex slayings of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy. The appeal also attacked Bernardo's then-wife Karla Homolka's "deal with the devil" plea bargain agreement, saying LeSage "failed to instruct the jury that the fact that the Crown had agreed to accept her guilty pleas to manslaughter did not in any way prevent the jury from being left in doubt as to whether it was Karla Homolka who had intentionally killed the two girls."
The defense theory during the trial, which was echoed in the appeal, proposed Homolka alone killed Mahaffy and French, so Bernardo should be guilty of nothing more than manslaughter. The Crown's appeal response states Homolka's testimony was "not essential to a conviction for murder" due to the disturbing videos.
The Crown asserted that the videotapes showed Bernardo's attitude towards his victims saying he not only brutally degraded them but also continually demanded that they thank him and ask for more. By his behavior, recorded on tape, he showed that he thought nothing of the two girls and would not have hesitated to kill them.
"Any reasonable person who had seen the videotapes would find it impossible to believe that Karla Homolka would do anything to his victims without his permission. The video footage demonstrates that Bernardo remained in 'control' at all material times and was the dominant participant in the murders. Nevertheless, the defense argued for manslaughter on the theory Bernardo twice suffered the great misfortune that the minute his back was turned, Homolka, to his surprise, killed their captive. Any suggestion that Homolka could have killed the girls on her own volition, when considered against the video footage and the relationship depicted therein, is incredible," the Crown stated.
The prosecution believed Homolka was "guilty as a party to first-degree murder when Bernardo strangled them, notwithstanding her convictions for manslaughter, which were permitted at the time when the videotapes were still hidden from the authorities. In the alternative that even in the unlikely event that Homolka killed the girls, Bernardo aided and abetted a planned and deliberate murder, or was a substantial contributing cause of murder committed in the course of sexual assault and forcible confinement." In that role, Bernardo would also be guilty of first-degree murder.
Later in February, 2000, Federal Court Justice, Daniele Tremblay-Lamer, rejected an attempt by news organizations to gain access to unpublished details of Karla Homolka's life in prison. The issue concerned a publication ban on psychiatric assessments and other documents in Homolka's file. The documents were part of a lawsuit which Homolka filed in November 1999 when she asked the courts to overturn a warden's decision denying her escorted passes from the prison in Joliette, Quebec. Homolka later withdrew her request, which had prompted an outcry from those opposed to freeing her. Councel for news organizations the Globe and Mail, Thomson Newspapers and Southam Inc. attempted to appeal a court clerk's decision on the files' confidentiality but Justice Tremblay-Lamer refused to hear the matter, saying the matter was closed the minute Homolka withdrew her motion.
Late the following March, Ken Murray, Paul Bernardo's former lawyer, asked Justice Patrick Gravely to throw out a charge that he had illegally held the killer's sex videotapes from police, saying it took an "unreasonable" three years to get to trial. Murray had previously held on to the tapes for 17 months after he found them hidden in a washroom spotlight in May 1993. In his submission, Murray blamed the delay on a 26-month preliminary hearing in which he says his rights to a speedy-trial were unfairly impinged by the state as it sought only to protect his client's rights without showing any concern for his own.
Lawyers Rape Tape Case
In April, 2000, according to a further report in the Toronto Star, during his trial on charges of obstructing justice, Paul Bernardo's former lawyer, Ken Murray, tabled a handwritten note he had received from Bernardo which warned him that the videos depicting the rape and torture of two teenage victims "may first appear to be irrelevant." The two-page letter, which also included a sketch of where the videos were hidden in a secret hiding place in a ceiling light in the bathroom of the home he shared with Karla Homolka also warned Murray not to view the gruesome tapes. "Although we will have to go through them in the future," the letter said, "at this time, I instruct you not to view them." According to another court document, Bernardo gave Murray the go-ahead just twelve days after the tapes were retrieved but there was no indication in the documents if Murray followed his client's orders at that time. Those instructions set off a three-year legal battle for Murray, who was charged after he withheld the tapes because Bernardo said they would be necessary for his defense.
After Bernardo was charged in May 1993 with the first-degree murder of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, he wrote the note leading Murray to the tapes police had missed in a three-month search of the couple's home in Port Dalhousie, a suburb of St. Catharines, Ontario. In the note, Bernardo instructed Murray to use the code words "how about those Jays" if successful in finding the tapes and "how about those Leafs" if unsuccessful. The note ends with the comments "good luck" and "God bless."
Seventeen months after Murray received the tapes, he handed them in to the authorities and resigned from the case. A judicial inquiry later found that if the Crown had been in possession of the tapes, Homolka's plea bargain, made in exchange for testimony against her ex-husband, would not have been necessary.
Murray's lawyer asked the court for permission to use his client's letters and discussions with Bernardo so he could properly defend his client. Tony Bryant, Bernardo's new lawyer, argued that making those communications public would jeopardize Bernardo's planned appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Justice Patrick Gravely later ruled that Murray's right to defend himself far outweighed Bernardo's right to solicitor-client privilege.
On April 13, 2000, the Star further reported that during Ken Murray's trial on charges of obstructing justice, Paul Bernardo's murder trial lawyer, John Rosen, testified that Murray hadn't told him that he had Bernardo's rape videos when he asked him to take over the case in August 1994. He also stated that Carolyn MacDonald, Murray's junior counsel, hadn't mentioned the videos during a discussion in which she criticized Murray's handling of the case. Rosen insisted that even when he was formally hired as Bernardo's new lawyer at the Niagara Detention Center in August 1994, during a three-way chat between himself, Murray and Bernardo, the tapes weren't mentioned.
The prosecution argued that Murray attempted to obstruct justice by hiding the tapes for 17 months after retrieving them from Bernardo's home
Rosen later testified that when he first saw Bernardo's rape videos he felt an "ethical obligation" to give them to police. "I was stunned by what I saw," Rosen said, recalling his first viewing of the videos in September 1994. He said it was clear in his first viewing of the videos that they showed "direct evidence" that Bernardo was guilty of the abduction, unlawful confinement and aggravated sexual assault of French and Mahaffy.
"There was no evidence of any killing, but clearly these girls were killed and he is a party to homicide," Rosen said. While he said he saw no option but to hand the tapes over to prosecutors, he first tried to use them as leverage to plea-bargain Bernardo a second-degree murder conviction and a chance of parole after 15 years. He testified that he told high-ranking government prosecutors that a first-degree murder trial would be "dreadful" and "devastating" to the victims' families and "humiliating to the memory of their children." He said prosecutors had a good idea of what evidence had been passed to him by Murray and he warned them if "a picture's worth a thousand words then start multiplying it.

Later in April, as Murray's trial continued, a detailed transcription of the "rape videos" was read to the court. One of the most damning scenes is when the supposedly innocent Homolka is described as reaching for a dark green bottle known to contain the animal tranquillizer Halothane and, after soaking a rag with it, holds it to Jane Doe's mouth and nose. She then smiles, waves, blows kisses and licks her lips for the camera before sexually assaulting the girl and sitting naked on her.
This scene and others was detailed to the court in an attempt to strengthen Ken Murray's assertion that he kept Paul Bernardo's rape videos from prosecutors because they suggested Homolka was as likely as Bernardo to be a schoolgirl killer. Reading from a frame-by-frame and word-by-word police transcript of the chilling videos, Murray's lawyer, Austin Cooper, laid out details of the sinister rape of unconscious schoolgirl known only as Jane Doe, which had been previously shrouded in secrecy. Cooper's reading of that section of the video went far beyond the scant audio portions revealed at Bernardo's trial.
Cooper also read details of the couple's fatal drug rape of Tammy Homolka, Karla's 15-year-old sister on Christmas Eve, 1990, which she and Bernardo videotaped. Other footage, shot just two weeks after Tammy's murder, clearly shows Homolka pretending to be her dead sister while having sex with Bernardo.
The sections of the transcript depicting the rapes of French and Mahaffy was not read into the court record as they were protected by a publication ban which prohibited the reporting of any details but even without it, the details that were read cast a dark pall over court. The mothers of French and Mahaffy, who had previously been in attendance during the trial, left the courtroom as the reading began.
At one stage the gravity of what he was reading took its toll on Austin Cooper and he broke down in mid-sentence, asked for a break and was visibly choked with emotion as he left the courtroom. Superior Court Justice Patrick Gravely was also shaken by what he had heard and ordered an early lunch recess and an extended afternoon break.
Even case-hardened journalists who had previously seen or heard the tapes at Bernardo's trial five years before left the room or stopped taking notes to bury their heads in their hands.
Early in May, 2000, Karla Homolka's bid to gain prison passes to attend a halfway house in Montreal received a boost when a taxpayer-funded women's group lent its support to her campaign. The Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, which operates on a federal subsidy, not only supported her application but also wished Homolka "every success" in her Federal Court bid to overturn a warden's denial of escorted passes to a CAEFS-operated Montreal halfway house. Hearing of the group's support, Tim Danson, lawyer for the parents of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, suggested CAEFS was either "terribly ill-informed" about Homolka or was "not qualified" to assess her case.
Danson had previously asked that Homolka not be released on parole in July 2001 but should instead go before the National Parole Board as a dangerous inmate who should be held for the full 12-year sentence.
Homolka sought Federal Court relief in 1999 after Joliette warden Marie-Andree Cyrenne refused her bid for a series of escorted passes to the Maison Therese-Casgrain, a Montreal halfway house operated by the Elizabeth Fry Society of Quebec. Homolka's original bid was bolstered by psychiatric and psychological reports from her 1993 trial, which portray Homolka as an abused victim of Bernardo. Psychological reports filed in response by Joliette prison were deemed confidential and could not be published.
One reason for Homolka's bid to attend the safe house is that her girlfriend, Lynda Veronneau, was previously paroled from Joliette prison two years into a four-year term for leading a passive ex-girlfriend on a string of robberies. Veronneau had previously kept Homolka's true identity from her family by referring to her simply as "Jessica" telling them that she was deeply in love with her and planned to live with her when Homolka was released.
In June, 2000, the Toronto Star reported that seven years after he first became involved in the Bernardo Homolka saga, Ken Murray was acquitted of obstruction of justice.
In an interview, after the court's decision, Murray suggested that, even though he was happy with the court's ruling, he may never be able to shake the stigma of being the man who attempted to protect Canada's most reviled sex killer, and inadvertently his then-wife, Karla Homolka. "There's a saying among prosecutors that, if you can't convict them, at least you can ruin their lives," Murray said, "but, unfortunately, that's what they did to me."

Karla Holmolka and Paul Bernardo:
Behind the Headlines
December 23, 1990, was the big day — Tammy's deflowering. Paul used his new video camcorder to take videos of Mr. and Mrs. Homolka, their daughters, Karla, Tammy and Lori and the Christmas decorations in the house.
Paul plied Tammy with drinks, laced with the sedative Halcion. The effects of the drugs and alcohol were swift and Tammy was out cold on the couch in no time. When the other members of the household went up to bed, Karla and Paul started to work on Tammy. Paul held the camera on Tammy while he raped her, leaving Karla to keep the halothane-laden rag over her sister's face. Then he ordered Karla to make sexual advances to her sleeping sister.
Jane, the Wedding Gift
Karla was obsessed with Paul's happiness. Her greatest fear was that she would not be able to hold onto this wild and thrilling man who was to become her husband. When he would become bored or distracted, she would either do something to excite him or find another person for him to get excited about. Paul harped continually that Tammy was no longer available to him for his sexual pleasure and blamed Karla for causing her death. Karla searched for a replacement for Tammy — someone very young and virginal.
Karla knew just the right person, a teenager we'll call Jane, who looked very much like Karla's dead sister, Tammy. .Karla and Jane spent the afternoon together and went to the mall where they tried on cloths. Jane told karla that she was still virgin.
Karla got to check out the fifteen year old completely naked as they tried on the clothes.  Karl noted that her budding A-cup breasts were filling out her training bra and she had only the lightest wisps of blonde pubic hair but she was still essentially bald.   Fifteen-year-old Jane would be Karla's wedding gift to Paul.
Jane idolized Karla as a beautiful, sophisticated role model and gratefully accepted Karla's invitation to the Bernardos' new home they rented at 57 Bayview. The first evening, Karla took Jane to dinner and spent hours talking to her and plying her with sweet alcoholic drinks, laced with Halcion tablets. Jane passed out and slept deeply.
Once Jane was soundly asleep, Karla called Paul over for his surprise gift Karla gave Paul Jane to rape. How delighted he was when he saw how much Jane resembled Tammy. He was a bit concerned that Karla was using the same drug that killed Tammy to subdue Jane, but Karla convinced him that she was in control of the situation this time.
Once they undressed Jane, Paul videotaped Karla as she performed cunylingus on the sleeping girl.
Then Paul raped the girl for close to 20 minute taking her virginity culminating with Paul ejaculating directly into the teenager’s vagina. With that accomplished and memorialized in the videotape, he moved on to his favorite fun — a brutal kind of anal sex. Fortunately for Jane, she was so drugged that she did not wake up during the whole disgusting ordeal.
Karla was left to clean the blood off the fifteen-year-old girl and put her to bed for the night. The next morning, Jane, who was very sick to her stomach and understandably sore, met Paul — she thought for the first time. She had no idea what had really happened to her.
While Paul seemed very grateful for the gift of Jane's virginity and was continually amazed at the things Karla would do for him, he was having second thoughts about marrying her. She was, after all, getting old, having already passed her twenty-first birthday and she was a far cry from being the virgin for which he lusted.
After their marriage, Karla and Paul Bernardo lived in their home on Bayview in St. Catharines.  Paul had begun augmenting his income by smuggling cigarettes across   the border and needed the stolen license plates to disguise his frequent visits across the American-Canadian line. It was the need for a stolen license plate that brought him into contact with his first murder victim, Leslie Mahaffy.

Leslie Mahaffy
Leslie Mahaffy was a troubled youngster. Her strong, independent personality seemed to be at the root of the problem, which manifested itself in ignoring her curfews, engaging in promiscuous sex, skipping school and even shoplifting. Her parents responded by getting tough on Leslie when she broke the rules.
On Friday, June 14, 1991, Leslie went out for the evening with her friends and stayed out well past her curfew. At 2 A.M., she found herself locked out of her house. She called her girlfriend to ask her if she could spend the night with her, but the girlfriend didn't think that her mother would allow it at that hour. Leslie told her girlfriend that she was going back home to wake up her parents.
Leslie had actually gone back to her home to see if there was any way to get in without waking her parents. With the worst possible luck imaginable, she encountered Paul Bernardo who was prowling around the neighborhood looking for license plates to steal.
He pulled a knife on Leslie Mahaffy and forced her to go in his car. Paul restrained the girl’s hands with tape and partially undressed her. Paul digitally penetrated her anally and vaginally while sitting in the car. Paul had Leslie orally copulate him in the car. He ejaculated into her mouth after only a few seconds.
Paul took his catch home.
While Karla slept, he began to videotape the fourteen-year-old Leslie naked and blindfolded. When Karla woke up, she was very angry that Paul had used their best champagne glasses to entertain his new toy. Finally, Karla came around and started being the obedient wife that Paul demanded.
Paul gave Karla elaborate instructions on how to make love to Leslie. Paul directed Karla to tie the girl spread eagle on the edge of the mattress.  Karla was instructed to kneel down between the girl’s legs and to suck Leslie’s clitoris into her mouth while she penetrated Leslie’s anus with a dildo.   
It was the voice of a director in an important film. Every moment had to be just perfect for the videotape he was making. After the prelude with Karla, Paul went in for the rough stuff, while his wife held the camera.
The brute force of his anal penetration caused Leslie to scream hysterically in pain. Mahaffy was restrained face down on the mattress as he violently raped her up her anus.
 The rough stuff escalated, hour by hour over the course of four days.  Paul took to shocking the girl’s vagina with an electrical wire as she screamed and begged for mercy.    and Leslie died.
On the evening June 29, 1991, a man and his wife were canoeing on Lake Gibson when they came across a concrete block with some pieces of animal flesh encased in it. Later, he went back to the spot and, with the help of a fisherman, pulled out the concrete block and looked at it closely. Inside the block was the calf and foot of a young woman.
Soon, the place was alive with cops, who found a total of five concrete blocks that had been dumped there in the shallow water. Police theorized that whoever dumped this body in Lake Gibson was not familiar with the area or he would have dumped the concrete blocks over the bridge where the deep water may have kept them a secret forever.
Not long afterwards, the torso of a young woman was found in the water. The body parts that had been found in the concrete block had been cut from her torso with a power saw. Leslie's distinctive braces provided the clues to her identification.
The Second Murder?
Paul deprived of his eccentric entertainment was prone to ill humor. This simply would not do. Karla, the ever-dutiful wife called Jane back into service. But Jane was far from the ideal sex slave. First of all, the girl upset them both by refusing to let Paul have intercourse with her (Jane thought she was still a virgin). Oral sex was all she would agree to. Then she told her riding instructor about Paul and the instructor told Jane's mother. The result was that Paul and Karla had less opportunity to enjoy themselves with Jane. One night, things got out of hand again with the halothane and Jane stopped breathing for awhile. This scared the daylights out of Paul and Karla.
Not only that, Paul was become annoyed with his new wife. He questioned her competence with the halothane. Karla was frantic. She had to do something to put some new romance back into their relationship.
For a while, another willing girl satisfied their needs, but eventually she moved back to Youngstown, Ohio, and the Bernardos were bereft once again for entertainment. This always created tensions in their marriage tensions that were unbearable to Karla.
November 30, 1991, pretty and vivacious fourteen-year-old Terri Anderson disappeared Six months later she was found in the water at Port Dalhousie. The medical examiner saw no evidence of foul play, despite the difficulties of determining such factors in a body that had been in the water for six months. The coroner ruled that her death was by drowning, probably as a result of drinking beer and taking LSD.
The coroner's ruling was controversial in light of what had happened to Leslie Mahaffy. Whether or not the attractive youngster was another of Karla and Paul's victims is still not certain.

 Kristen French

Kristen French
On April 16, 1992, a very popular and attractive teenager named Kristen French was abducted from a church parking lot. Karla had lured the pretty girl over to their car on the pretense of asking directions. When Kristen stood by the car looking at Karla's map, Paul forced the girl into the backseat with his knife.
At the outset, both Paul and Karla knew that Kristen would have to die. She had clearly seen them, knew where they lived and had seen their dog. Even so, they didn't want Kristen to figure this out, particularly since she was bigger than Karla was and fairly strong despite her youth.
Kristen, who was a smart girl, did everything she could to cooperate with this depraved couple and their outrageous and humiliating demands. She believed that cooperation was her only chance for survival. The ordeal became worse and worse. The more she cooperated, the more sadistic Paul became. The following activity, found in Williams' book, was taken from the videotaped evidence.
"'I'm going to piss on you, okay? Then I'm going to shit on you.' Paul said in a whisper... Kristen did not move, even when he slapped her face with his semi-erect penis.
"'Don't make me mad. Don't make me hurt you,' he said, urging her to smile when he rubbed his groin into her face.
"'Don't worry, I won't piss in your face.'

"Finally, he stood over her and urinated. Then he moved. Turning his buttocks into her face, he squatted over her face and defecated on her mouth.
"'You're a f--king piece of shit. But I like you,' he told her. 'You look good covered in piss.'"
The indignities went on for a day or two, all meticulously captured on video for the future enjoyment of the newlyweds. Then came the final and worst indignity of all for Kristen French, but her death was not captured on film.
On April 30, 1992, Kristen's remains were found in a ditch. Her naked body had not been dismembered like Leslie's, leading the investigators to erroneously conclude that the murders of the two teenagers were not connected.
Amazing Evidence
On February 19, police executed the search warrants for Paul and Karla's house and found an amazing amount of evidence. Paul had a written description of every one of the Scarborough rapes plus an extensive library of books and videos on sexual deviation, pornography and serial killers.
The police also found one brief home video that indicated that there had been more than one lascivious person in the Bernardo household. Quite explicitly, the short video showed Karla as an enthusiastic lesbian in sexual acts with two other women. A week later, George Walker and Murray Segal, a plea-bargain specialist for the attorney general, discussed the deal for Karla. Karla would get twelve years in prison for each of the two victims, but the sentences would be served concurrently. She would be eligible for parole in a little over three years with good behavior. The government even agreed to contact the parole board on Karla's behalf, pointing out to them the importance of her testimony against Paul. Segal would do what he could to arrange for Karla to serve out her sentence in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison. The trial would be very brief and she would waive her right to a preliminary hearing.
In exchange for this leniency, Karla would agree to tell the absolute truth about her involvement in the crimes and everything she knew about them. Karla agreed unconditionally.
In early March, Karla was checked into a psychiatric hospital for assessment. She was given heavy doses of drugs and insisted on being given even larger doses. Eventually, Karla got up the nerve to write an important letter to her parents:
Dear Mom, Dad and Lori,
This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write and you'll probably all hate me once you read it. I've kept this inside myself for so long and I just can't lie to you any more. Both Paul and I are responsible for Tammy's death. Paul was "in love" with her and wanted to have sex with her. He wanted me to help him. He wanted me to get sleeping pills from work to drug her with. He threatened me and physically and emotionally abused me when I refused. No words I can say can make you understand what he put me through. So stupidly I agreed to do as he said. But something maybe the combination of drugs and the food she ate that night caused her to vomit. I tried so hard to save her. I am so sorry. But no words I can say can bring her back I would gladly give my life for hers. I don't expect you to ever forgive me, for I will never forgive myself.
Karla —XOXO
X-Rated Videos
The trial of Paul Bernardo was delayed for two years after his arrest. One of the reasons for the delay was that Bernardo had placed his first lawyer, Ken Murray, in a very difficult ethical situation. Bernardo had given Murray the videotapes that he and Karla had made of their adventures, believing that by doing so, they would never get into the hands of prosecutors.
However, the prosecutors knew of the videotapes from Karla and had wiretapped Murray's conversations with Bernardo. Eventually, the pressure increased and Murray had to do something about the videotapes in his possession. The videotapes were turned over to the prosecutors and Murray withdrew from the case. Veteran defense lawyer John Rosen took his place as Bernardo's lawyer. This series of activities alone caused a delay of one year in the start of the trial.
In May of 1995, Bernardo's trial began in Judge Patrick LeSage's courtroom with the videotapes as critical pieces of evidence. Bernardo faced two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of forcible confinement, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of performing an indignity on a human body.
For two years, information about the case had been sealed, although sordid details had leaked out in the American press. Copies of newspapers were smuggled into Canada.
Prosecutor Ray Houlahan opened the trial with a full-day story of Karla's life as a victim of the dominating sadist, a brain-washed, frightened accomplice to the most degrading criminal acts.
Crown prosecutor Ray Houlahan began with a segment showing Karla naked, masturbating, with the camera focused on her vagina.

Book cover: Lethal Marriage
Nick Pron in Lethal Marriage describes the electrifying effect the video had on the courtroom: "Gasps of surprise and disgust, perhaps even shock, along with plenty of embarrassed giggles, could be heard throughout the courtroom as the camera lingered on Homolka's exposed body for several minutes as she stimulated herself... For the previous two years, ever since her arrest, Homolka's face had been almost as well known as the prime minister's. She had been seen on television in footage taken at her wedding, with her friends, and at her trialBut few people in the courtroom that day were expecting to see a triple X-rated tape, a close study of the country's most infamous woman in a variety of sexually explicit positions."


Sex Slaves

Sketch of Bernardo in court
It seemed like an odd way for the prosecutor to treat his star witness, however Houlahan explained that the dialog in the videos had been scripted by Bernardo and was a good example of how he forced his will on Karla.
As more of these videotapes of Leslie, Kristen and Jane were shown, the jury was provided with indisputable and powerful evidence of Paul Bernardo's sexual depravity. As if that were not enough, Karla was called to the stand to elaborate on what the jurors had just seen and heard.
What she described in her relationship with Paul was an escalating theme of sexual degradation similar to what Paul had begun with other girlfriends before he met Karla. In Karla, the willing victim, the degradation knew no boundaries. He made her wear a dog's "choke" collar; he inserted a wire bottle into her vagina; and he almost strangled her with a wire cord to satisfy his sadistic fantasies. Paul told her that his choke fantasy was "important to him and it wouldn't hurt anybody." He told her that she was nothing without him and he would call her names, like slut, bitch, and cunt.
When the defense had its turn in the courtroom, John Rosen attacked Karla's credibility. His goal was to show that she was not the victim she portrayed herself to be, but a willing participant in the couple's rape and murder spree.
He was, at least, successful in showing Karla to be a morally vacuous woman with no remorse for her part in these crimes. In particular, Kristen's murder had to be committed at a particular time so that Karla and Paul could spend Easter dinner with Karla's parents. Immediately after Kristen was strangled, Karla left to blow dry her hair. If it was not immediately clear at the trial, it became clear shortly after, that Karla had cleverly manipulated the circumstances of her cooperation with the government to engineer one of the worst deals that the Canadian government had ever made with a criminal witness.
Regardless of Karla's degree of guilt or innocence and the deal she had made with the authorities, it did not save Bernardo from the outrage that he kindled in the minds of the jurors. On September 1, 1995, Bernardo was convicted on all the charges against him regarding the kidnappings, rapes and murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. He also faced trials in the death of Tammy Homolka and the serial rapes in Scarborough. Under Canadian law, Bernardo can apply for parole after twenty-five years in prison, although it is unlikely that he would be successful in any parole bid.
Legal Maneuvers
In February, 2000, as reported by The Toronto Star, Paul Bernardo launched his long-awaited appeal with his legal team accusing Justice Patrick LeSage of evidentiary and procedural mistakes during the 1995 first-degree murder trial for the sex slayings of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy. The appeal also attacked Bernardo's then-wife Karla Homolka's "deal with the devil" plea bargain agreement, saying LeSage "failed to instruct the jury that the fact that the Crown had agreed to accept her guilty pleas to manslaughter did not in any way prevent the jury from being left in doubt as to whether it was Karla Homolka who had intentionally killed the two girls."
The defense theory during the trial, which was echoed in the appeal, proposed Homolka alone killed Mahaffy and French, so Bernardo should be guilty of nothing more than manslaughter. The Crown's appeal response states Homolka's testimony was "not essential to a conviction for murder" due to the disturbing videos.
The Crown asserted that the videotapes showed Bernardo's attitude towards his victims saying he not only brutally degraded them but also continually demanded that they thank him and ask for more. By his behavior, recorded on tape, he showed that he thought nothing of the two girls and would not have hesitated to kill them.
"Any reasonable person who had seen the videotapes would find it impossible to believe that Karla Homolka would do anything to his victims without his permission. The video footage demonstrates that Bernardo remained in 'control' at all material times and was the dominant participant in the murders. Nevertheless, the defense argued for manslaughter on the theory Bernardo twice suffered the great misfortune that the minute his back was turned, Homolka, to his surprise, killed their captive. Any suggestion that Homolka could have killed the girls on her own volition, when considered against the video footage and the relationship depicted therein, is incredible," the Crown stated.
The prosecution believed Homolka was "guilty as a party to first-degree murder when Bernardo strangled them, notwithstanding her convictions for manslaughter, which were permitted at the time when the videotapes were still hidden from the authorities. In the alternative that even in the unlikely event that Homolka killed the girls, Bernardo aided and abetted a planned and deliberate murder, or was a substantial contributing cause of murder committed in the course of sexual assault and forcible confinement." In that role, Bernardo would also be guilty of first-degree murder.
Later in February, 2000, Federal Court Justice, Daniele Tremblay-Lamer, rejected an attempt by news organizations to gain access to unpublished details of Karla Homolka's life in prison. The issue concerned a publication ban on psychiatric assessments and other documents in Homolka's file. The documents were part of a lawsuit which Homolka filed in November 1999 when she asked the courts to overturn a warden's decision denying her escorted passes from the prison in Joliette, Quebec. Homolka later withdrew her request, which had prompted an outcry from those opposed to freeing her. Councel for news organizations the Globe and Mail, Thomson Newspapers and Southam Inc. attempted to appeal a court clerk's decision on the files' confidentiality but Justice Tremblay-Lamer refused to hear the matter, saying the matter was closed the minute Homolka withdrew her motion.
Late the following March, Ken Murray, Paul Bernardo's former lawyer, asked Justice Patrick Gravely to throw out a charge that he had illegally held the killer's sex videotapes from police, saying it took an "unreasonable" three years to get to trial. Murray had previously held on to the tapes for 17 months after he found them hidden in a washroom spotlight in May 1993. In his submission, Murray blamed the delay on a 26-month preliminary hearing in which he says his rights to a speedy-trial were unfairly impinged by the state as it sought only to protect his client's rights without showing any concern for his own.
Lawyers Rape Tape Case
In April, 2000, according to a further report in the Toronto Star, during his trial on charges of obstructing justice, Paul Bernardo's former lawyer, Ken Murray, tabled a handwritten note he had received from Bernardo which warned him that the videos depicting the rape and torture of two teenage victims "may first appear to be irrelevant." The two-page letter, which also included a sketch of where the videos were hidden in a secret hiding place in a ceiling light in the bathroom of the home he shared with Karla Homolka also warned Murray not to view the gruesome tapes. "Although we will have to go through them in the future," the letter said, "at this time, I instruct you not to view them." According to another court document, Bernardo gave Murray the go-ahead just twelve days after the tapes were retrieved but there was no indication in the documents if Murray followed his client's orders at that time. Those instructions set off a three-year legal battle for Murray, who was charged after he withheld the tapes because Bernardo said they would be necessary for his defense.
After Bernardo was charged in May 1993 with the first-degree murder of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, he wrote the note leading Murray to the tapes police had missed in a three-month search of the couple's home in Port Dalhousie, a suburb of St. Catharines, Ontario. In the note, Bernardo instructed Murray to use the code words "how about those Jays" if successful in finding the tapes and "how about those Leafs" if unsuccessful. The note ends with the comments "good luck" and "God bless."
Seventeen months after Murray received the tapes, he handed them in to the authorities and resigned from the case. A judicial inquiry later found that if the Crown had been in possession of the tapes, Homolka's plea bargain, made in exchange for testimony against her ex-husband, would not have been necessary.
Murray's lawyer asked the court for permission to use his client's letters and discussions with Bernardo so he could properly defend his client. Tony Bryant, Bernardo's new lawyer, argued that making those communications public would jeopardize Bernardo's planned appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Justice Patrick Gravely later ruled that Murray's right to defend himself far outweighed Bernardo's right to solicitor-client privilege.
On April 13, 2000, the Star further reported that during Ken Murray's trial on charges of obstructing justice, Paul Bernardo's murder trial lawyer, John Rosen, testified that Murray hadn't told him that he had Bernardo's rape videos when he asked him to take over the case in August 1994. He also stated that Carolyn MacDonald, Murray's junior counsel, hadn't mentioned the videos during a discussion in which she criticized Murray's handling of the case. Rosen insisted that even when he was formally hired as Bernardo's new lawyer at the Niagara Detention Center in August 1994, during a three-way chat between himself, Murray and Bernardo, the tapes weren't mentioned.
The prosecution argued that Murray attempted to obstruct justice by hiding the tapes for 17 months after retrieving them from Bernardo's home
Rosen later testified that when he first saw Bernardo's rape videos he felt an "ethical obligation" to give them to police. "I was stunned by what I saw," Rosen said, recalling his first viewing of the videos in September 1994. He said it was clear in his first viewing of the videos that they showed "direct evidence" that Bernardo was guilty of the abduction, unlawful confinement and aggravated sexual assault of French and Mahaffy.
"There was no evidence of any killing, but clearly these girls were killed and he is a party to homicide," Rosen said. While he said he saw no option but to hand the tapes over to prosecutors, he first tried to use them as leverage to plea-bargain Bernardo a second-degree murder conviction and a chance of parole after 15 years. He testified that he told high-ranking government prosecutors that a first-degree murder trial would be "dreadful" and "devastating" to the victims' families and "humiliating to the memory of their children." He said prosecutors had a good idea of what evidence had been passed to him by Murray and he warned them if "a picture's worth a thousand words then start multiplying it.

Later in April, as Murray's trial continued, a detailed transcription of the "rape videos" was read to the court. One of the most damning scenes is when the supposedly innocent Homolka is described as reaching for a dark green bottle known to contain the animal tranquillizer Halothane and, after soaking a rag with it, holds it to Jane Doe's mouth and nose. She then smiles, waves, blows kisses and licks her lips for the camera before sexually assaulting the girl and sitting naked on her.
This scene and others was detailed to the court in an attempt to strengthen Ken Murray's assertion that he kept Paul Bernardo's rape videos from prosecutors because they suggested Homolka was as likely as Bernardo to be a schoolgirl killer. Reading from a frame-by-frame and word-by-word police transcript of the chilling videos, Murray's lawyer, Austin Cooper, laid out details of the sinister rape of unconscious schoolgirl known only as Jane Doe, which had been previously shrouded in secrecy. Cooper's reading of that section of the video went far beyond the scant audio portions revealed at Bernardo's trial.
Cooper also read details of the couple's fatal drug rape of Tammy Homolka, Karla's 15-year-old sister on Christmas Eve, 1990, which she and Bernardo videotaped. Other footage, shot just two weeks after Tammy's murder, clearly shows Homolka pretending to be her dead sister while having sex with Bernardo.
The sections of the transcript depicting the rapes of French and Mahaffy was not read into the court record as they were protected by a publication ban which prohibited the reporting of any details but even without it, the details that were read cast a dark pall over court. The mothers of French and Mahaffy, who had previously been in attendance during the trial, left the courtroom as the reading began.
At one stage the gravity of what he was reading took its toll on Austin Cooper and he broke down in mid-sentence, asked for a break and was visibly choked with emotion as he left the courtroom. Superior Court Justice Patrick Gravely was also shaken by what he had heard and ordered an early lunch recess and an extended afternoon break.
Even case-hardened journalists who had previously seen or heard the tapes at Bernardo's trial five years before left the room or stopped taking notes to bury their heads in their hands.
Early in May, 2000, Karla Homolka's bid to gain prison passes to attend a halfway house in Montreal received a boost when a taxpayer-funded women's group lent its support to her campaign. The Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, which operates on a federal subsidy, not only supported her application but also wished Homolka "every success" in her Federal Court bid to overturn a warden's denial of escorted passes to a CAEFS-operated Montreal halfway house. Hearing of the group's support, Tim Danson, lawyer for the parents of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, suggested CAEFS was either "terribly ill-informed" about Homolka or was "not qualified" to assess her case.
Danson had previously asked that Homolka not be released on parole in July 2001 but should instead go before the National Parole Board as a dangerous inmate who should be held for the full 12-year sentence.
Homolka sought Federal Court relief in 1999 after Joliette warden Marie-Andree Cyrenne refused her bid for a series of escorted passes to the Maison Therese-Casgrain, a Montreal halfway house operated by the Elizabeth Fry Society of Quebec. Homolka's original bid was bolstered by psychiatric and psychological reports from her 1993 trial, which portray Homolka as an abused victim of Bernardo. Psychological reports filed in response by Joliette prison were deemed confidential and could not be published.
One reason for Homolka's bid to attend the safe house is that her girlfriend, Lynda Veronneau, was previously paroled from Joliette prison two years into a four-year term for leading a passive ex-girlfriend on a string of robberies. Veronneau had previously kept Homolka's true identity from her family by referring to her simply as "Jessica" telling them that she was deeply in love with her and planned to live with her when Homolka was released.
In June, 2000, the Toronto Star reported that seven years after he first became involved in the Bernardo Homolka saga, Ken Murray was acquitted of obstruction of justice.
In an interview, after the court's decision, Murray suggested that, even though he was happy with the court's ruling, he may never be able to shake the stigma of being the man who attempted to protect Canada's most reviled sex killer, and inadvertently his then-wife, Karla Homolka. "There's a saying among prosecutors that, if you can't convict them, at least you can ruin their lives," Murray said, "but, unfortunately, that's what they did to me."