Keywords Crime

With those words as his cue, the handsome 30-year-old defendant in one of the most horrific murder trials in Canadian history stepped out of the prisoner's box, walked briskly to the witness stand and began trying to explain the inexplicable - his involvement in the brutal rapes and tragic deaths of 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy and 15-year-old Kristen French. Under Rosen's questioning, Bernardo readily admitted that he kidnapped, confined and sexually assaulted the two girls in the St. Catharines, Ont., home he shared with his wife, Karla Homolka. Then, with the voice and demeanor of a contrite schoolboy, the former bookkeeper turned to the eight-man, four-woman jury in the Toronto courtroom and declared: "People, I know I've done a lot of terrible things. And I've caused a lot of sadness and sorrow to a lot of people, and I'm really sorry for that and know I deserve to be punished. But I didn't kill these girls."

Bernardo's version of events followed the testimony of 85 Crown witnesses in a trial that began three months ago. With his testimony almost completed after 3½ days last week, the defence had only one more witness scheduled, and it looked likely the trial would wrap up before the end of August, possibly as early as this week. With the jury apparently about to decide Bernardo's fate, a curious public, shocked by the unspeakable horror of the crimes, debated the emerging details of the case, which had been kept under wraps by a court-ordered publication ban until this summer.

By last week, the jury had repeatedly seen 3½ hours of unsettling home-made videotapes depicting Bernardo, his ex-wife and their victims engaging in various degrading sexual acts. And it had heard Homolka herself - who since the crimes has divorced Bernardo and is already serving concurrent 12-year terms for manslaughter - testify that he strangled both victims in the master bedroom of their home. But Bernardo emphatically denied those accusations, insisting instead that his captives died accidentally and, in both cases, only when he had left them alone with Homolka.

In a quick and skilful examination that lasted less than three hours, Rosen questioned Bernardo about his entire five-year relationship with Homolka. On several occasions, Bernardo directly contradicted key pieces of his ex-wife's testimony. He maintained that, together, they had sexually assaulted Homolka's 15-year-old sister, Tammy, at least once before the one tragic incident that Homolka acknowledged - drugging and raping the unconscious teenager on Dec. 24, 1990, an attack that led to her death when she choked on her vomit. In addition, contrary to Homolka's claim that she played no part in the dismembering of Mahaffy's body with a power saw, Bernardo said he handed the body parts to his wife for cleaning as he cut up the remains.

Rosen also cleared up one of the lingering mysteries of the trial: the whereabouts of the graphic videotapes that eluded police when they searched the Bernardos' house for evidence while the Crown was negotiating a plea-bargain arrangement with Homolka. Rosen explained that on May 6, 1993, almost three months after Bernardo's arrest and six days after police had concluded their exhaustive search, Bernardo's lawyer at the time, Ken Murray, briefly had access to the house. While in the dwelling, Murray received a call on his cellular phone from Bernardo, who told him where to find the videotapes. Bernardo testified that, shortly after Homolka left him on Jan. 5, 1993, he had removed a pot-light fixture in the upstairs washroom and hid the tapes in the ceiling. But neither Rosen nor Bernardo explained why Murray withheld the tapes until Sept. 10, 1994, when he withdrew from the case - 16 months after Homolka had agreed to testify against Bernardo in exchange for her relatively lenient sentence.

Having taken the gamble of putting the defendant on the stand and leaving him open to potentially damaging questioning by the prosecution, Rosen dispensed with his witness swiftly. Crown attorney Ray Houlahan then launched his cross-examination with a dramatic flourish. He played a segment of videotape for the jury, showing French being raped, and ordered an assistant to freeze the tape on one frame in which Bernardo's face was contorted in obvious rage. In a voice filled with indignation, Houlahan snapped: "That's the face of a killer, isn't it?" Bernardo, however, coolly dismissed the assertion. He did the same dozens of other times in what developed into a rambling, often disjointed cross-examination.

Bernardo's testimony took on a surreal tone as he repeatedly offered bland explanations for the most horrendous acts. The packed courtroom erupted in laughter when he remarked, in a serious tone, that he would probably require professional help to deal with his sexuality. He told Houlahan that his videotapes - showing the terrified teenage victims being forced to perform dozens of sexual acts, sometimes with their feet bound and their hands cuffed - were simply his version of home-made pornography. And even though the girls screamed in agony at times, especially when he raped them anally, Bernardo calmly insisted that he and Homolka were acting out shared fantasies of three-way sex in which the participants were happy and loved one another. That led Houlahan to inquire sarcastically: "Is this your idea of the three-way sex you wanted?"

Houlahan also used the videotapes to attack Bernardo's claim that Homolka enjoyed having multiple partners as much as he did, and his assertion that they were equal participants in the attacks on French and Mahaffy. On the tapes, he insisted, Bernardo can be heard issuing virtually all of the instructions while Homolka, along with the victims, performs sexual acts solely for his pleasure. After playing one segment, showing Bernardo drinking champagne and smiling at the camera while Homolka and a blindfolded Mahaffy simultaneously fellate him, the Crown attorney engaged in a typically hostile exchange with the defendant:

"You're the producer and director here, aren't you," Houlahan snapped.

"Yes, and so is Karla," replied Bernardo.

"You're acting like the king, the master."

"I was having three-way sex."

Throughout his testimony, Bernardo insisted that he and Homolka were continually searching for new and unusual sexual adventures from the night they met at a Toronto hotel on Oct. 17, 1987. At the time, he was a 23-year-old university graduate and aspiring accountant who lived with his parents in suburban Scarborough, while she was a 17-year-old Grade 12 student from St. Catharines. A couple of hours after meeting in the hotel restaurant, they were having sex in her room, even though another couple was present. The following summer, he said, they had a Polaroid camera for taking sexually explicit photos, including one in which he placed a rope around her neck and pressed a knife to her head while having intercourse from behind.

In response to questions from Rosen, he told the court that by the summer of 1990 their sexual antics had taken a dangerous new turn. Although by then engaged to Homolka, Bernardo had become sexually attracted to her younger sister Tammy. During a Sunday afternoon party at the Homolka residence, the teenager accompanied him across the nearby border to New York state for what was supposed to be a quick trip to purchase beer. Instead, they parked at a secluded spot near the Niagara River, got drunk and ended up kissing and petting. After being confronted by his angry and suspicious fiancée, he admitted what had happened.

After that, Bernardo told the jurors, he and Homolka began talking about having sex with Tammy, then made a plan to drug and rape her in late July, 1990. Homolka stole some Valium from the veterinary clinic where she worked as an assistant, he said, and one night, they gave Tammy wine and served her a spaghetti dinner spiked with the drug. The teenager passed out, Bernardo said, and he had sexual intercourse with her for about a minute before she began to wake up. That incident led to further transgressions, such as spying on her as she undressed at night, other attempts to assault her and, finally, the fatal Dec. 24, 1990, attack in which they knocked her out with a powerful sedative, then administered an anesthetic while the rape took place.

With Tammy gone, Bernardo said, he and Homolka began to talk about getting other girls for their sexual pleasure. In mid-January, 1991, while Homolka's parents and sister were away in Toronto on business, he picked up a young female hitchhiker in St. Catharines, forcibly brought her back to the Homolka home and raped her in Karla's bedroom. "I had the girl on the floor, and Karla stood in the doorway," he told the jury. "It was supposed to be for three-way sex but the girl wasn't compliant. She was fighting and arguing so Karla didn't want to do it. Afterward, I took the girl out to a back street and dropped her off, and it was never reported."

Bernardo insisted that the Mahaffy abduction began much like the hitchhiker incident, with a chance meeting, and it was supposed to end by dumping the victim, alive but violated, at an isolated location. At that time, Bernardo and Homolka were living together, their lavish, fairy-tale wedding was less than two weeks away, and he was earning his living by smuggling cigarettes from the United States.

Bernardo told the jury that in the early morning hours of June 15, 1991, he was near the Mahaffy home in Burlington, Ont., 50 km from his own home, trying to steal licence plates to use on his car during his almost-daily smuggling trips across the U.S. border. He said he accidentally bumped into Mahaffy just outside her home and spontaneously decided to abduct her. "I thought she was attractive, and I thought she would be a nice girl to have sex with Karla," Bernardo said.

He testified that he merely wanted to repay Homolka because the previous week, she had lured a teenager to their home for three-way sex. That girl, who testified against Bernardo under the pseudonym Jane Doe, was drugged and, while unconscious, sexually assaulted and videotaped. In his cross-examination, Houlahan pointedly asked Bernardo to explain numerous inconsistencies in his story about the attack on Mahaffy. He noted that, even though the girl was supposed to be a present for Homolka, Bernardo remained alone with her for about 14 hours, until about 4 p.m. on June 15. During that time, he raped Mahaffy and videotaped her performing numerous degrading acts. Only after they both showered did he take Mahaffy upstairs to the master bedroom for sex with Homolka.

The sexual activity, accompanied by steady consumption of alcohol, continued until about 1 a.m. on June 16, by which time a drunken Mahaffy was becoming hysterical, and Bernardo, by his own account, had had enough sex. He said he and Homolka gave Mahaffy enough Halcion to render her unconscious, and he intended to dump her somewhere back in Burlington. But when he returned to the bedroom after getting ready to leave, he said, he found the girl dead, possibly from the combined effects of drugs and alcohol. "What we did was for sex," Bernardo calmly stated. "It shouldn't have cost the girl her life. We were pretty much hysterical afterward."

Throughout last week's testimony, Bernardo never lost his composure, was never caught lying and, at times, appeared to enjoy firing snappy answers back at Houlahan, whose courtroom manner was wooden and stilted. When the Crown attorney asked long, convoluted questions, Bernardo took delight in saying he did not understand the query or, with a skeptical expression on his face, asking: "Is that a question, sir?"

Nevertheless, the prosecutor relentlessly pursued Bernardo and attempted to expose the improbable aspects of his story through a steady and dogged presentation of facts. He asked the accused man to recount in meticulous detail the April 16, 1992, abduction of French, in which he and Homolka forced the St. Catharines teenager into their car, in broad daylight, as she was returning home from school. According to Bernardo, they had been driving to a shopping centre that afternoon and had no plans to kidnap anyone. But the conversation turned to girls, he said, and Homolka spotted a teenager she liked, who happened to be French. In 15 to 30 seconds, he testified, they devised their kidnapping plan. "At the time," he explained, "Karla and me had evolved so much in our sexual life, so much fantasy and actual events had happened. I was drinking almost every day, and we used drugs at the time, and we were basically out of control."

But Houlahan pointed out to the jury that Bernardo happened to have a hunting knife in his Nissan 240SX sports car, and used the weapon during the abduction. He noted, too, that there was a blanket available to cover French for the short ride home. The Crown attorney also spent considerable time attacking Bernardo's assertion that he and Homolka always intended to release French once they had satisfied their sexual desires. He wondered how they could conceivably think about releasing a victim who would clearly be capable of identifying them.

Houlahan pursued his questioning by noting that French was blindfolded in one of the first videotapes made in the Bernardo home. But in another segment, shot a few hours later, her eyes were uncovered. In one of the most pointed accusations of his cross-examination, Houlahan said that the removal of the blindfold was the equivalent of a death sentence. "I take it she wasn't going home once the blindfold came off," he said.

"She was going home," Bernardo blandly replied.

"Notwithstanding that she'd seen your faces, your car and your house," Houlahan shot back incredulously.

"She was going home, she was going to stay, I hadn't made up my mind," the accused man finally said.

Although the jury had already seen the notorious videotapes, some parts as much as half a dozen times, Houlahan played them all again, meanwhile questioning Bernardo in excruciating detail about certain scenes to make his points. He noted that in one segment, shot early in French's three-day ordeal, the sobbing and terrified girl is kneeling on the floor while a sexually aroused Bernardo stands in front of her. "I suggest she was degraded and humiliated and this gave you a full erection," Houlahan snapped at Bernardo.

"I was excited because I was about to get fellatio," he responded.

"Not because you terrorized and degraded and humiliated her," the prosecutor asked again. "Doesn't that turn you on more sexually?"

"I can't say what turns me on more, sir," he said.

While he was prepared to admit beating the teenager, Bernardo was adamant that French's death was accidental. He said that in the early evening of April 18, a Saturday, he went out for fast food and to rent a video, leaving Homolka guarding French. The young girl's feet were bound and her hands were cuffed behind her back. As well, Bernardo had tied a black electrical cord around her neck and fastened it to the hope chest in the master bedroom. He contends that, while he was out, French asked to use the washroom. When Homolka untied her feet, she tried to escape and strangled herself to death.

That bore little resemblance to Homolka's version of events. She testified that French had died the following morning, Easter Sunday. She and Bernardo had taken turns assaulting French sexually with a wine bottle, she said, then he raped her anally and vaginally while holding a black electrical cord around her neck. When Bernardo was finished, she said, he strangled French, largely because they were expected at her parents' house for Easter dinner and could not risk leaving her alone.

Despite the length of the trial and the abundance of horrifying evidence, defence lawyer Rosen told the 12 jurors that they do not have many questions to ponder. "You just have to push the 'play' button on that video machine and you have the whole case before you," he said. "There is no doubt in the world that both of them - Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo - sexually assaulted and unlawfully confined these victims. The real question is who caused their deaths." After three months of testimony, it had come down to a matter of credibility - Homolka's, and Bernardo's. With their contradictory claims before them, that was the issue that the eight men and four women of the jury had to resolve.

Maclean's August 28, 1995

Author D'ARCY JENISH