Authors: Stephen G. Michaud,Roy Hazelwood
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
As detailed as a sexual sadist’s audiotaped, videotaped, photographed, and written records are, rarely do they depict his victim’s actual murder. Hazelwood believes the omission is conscious. “The act never completely fulfills the fantasy,” he says. “If the guy shows the killing, it might spoil the fantasy, and fantasies always are perfect.”
In an investigative application of this rule, Hazelwood once was called by a West Coast police department to consult on a highly unusual case.
A businessman had collapsed and died during a convention. Toxicological tests determined his cause of death was an overdose of PCP, or angel dust. A search of the man’s hotel room turned up a forty-five-minute audiocassette in which he described in detail the gruesome murder of two unnamed teenage couples. The question police put to Roy Hazelwood was simple: Was this story on the tape fact or fantasy?
“On the tape he says he quickly killed the females in both crimes,” says Hazelwood. “So it’s obvious his orientation was toward the males. He says, ‘When I had Jack on the bed I wish I’d put a plastic sheet beneath his body, because when I cut his throat his blood saturated and ruined the sheets and pillows.’
“With the other male victim it was, ‘I wished I’d stabbed him in the kidney, rather than the throat, because he died too quickly.’
“Fantasies are always perfect. This wasn’t perfect. I told the police department that in my opinion this was not a fantasy tape.”
Although the Toronto police inserted the appropriate language into their search warrant for the Port Dalhousie house—and Karla told them repeatedly of the videotapes Paul had made and how she was sure he’d kept them—repeated searches of the residence failed to find them. As it
turned out, Bernardo’s lawyer, acting on his client’s directions, retrieved the cassettes in early May 1993, and didn’t produce them until September 1994.
Between Karla Homolka’s January 1993 break with her husband and Bernardo’s arrest in February, Inspector Ron Mackay of the RCMP was summoned from Ottawa to Toronto. In a case so obviously outside the bounds of customary criminal behavior, local investigators wanted input from an expert in aberrant offenders.
Mackay had recently received from Hazelwood a draft of his compliant victim survey, which Roy was preparing for publication that spring with coauthors Dietz and Warren.
When he arrived in Toronto and learned why he’d been summoned, Mackay immediately thought of Hazelwood’s unpublished study.
“I could see the application in this case,” Mackay recalls. “I tracked Roy down in Tennessee and got his permission to share that unpublished paper with the investigation, because of their operational needs, so they could better understand what they were dealing with.”
Mackay also recommended the investigation reach out to Peter Collins of Toronto’s Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, a consulting forensic psychiatrist to the RCMP’s Violent Crimes Analysis Branch, who’d also worked cases with Hazelwood. Collins, too, had just read a draft of “Compliant Victims of the Sexual Sadist,” and agreed that the paper would shed light on Karla Homolka’s puzzling relationship with Paul Bernardo.
The study would play a pivotal role in persuading the police (and later, prosecutors) that while Karla Homolka was hardly an innocent, her husband was the motive force behind their crimes. “It was thought,” says Collins, “after everyone acquainted themselves with Roy’s work, that had Homolka never met Bernardo at that Howard Johnson she never would have played a part in any such crimes. She was his perfect victim.”
Hazelwood later also informally advised Bernardo’s prosecutors via their lead forensic psychiatrist, Steve Hucker. “We were talking one day and he said, ‘Guess what?’ ” Hucker remembers. “ ‘There’s another case just like yours that happened in Kentucky, and there’s just been a book published about it.’ ”
Mel Ignatow (pronounced Ig-NAH-toe), aged fifty, was a salesman for an import-export company in Louisville, Kentucky. Pretty, brown-eyed Brenda Sue Shaefer, thirty-six, was his fiancée.
In late September 1988, Shaefer’s four-year-old Buick Regal was found abandoned along a stretch of Interstate 64 in St. Matthews, a district within the urban Louisville area.
There was no sign of a struggle in the car, and police discounted the possibility of a random attack. Yet they also could not find the victim, who was presumed dead. Nor could they generate a case against their prime suspect, Ignatow himself.
Then in January 1990, Ignatow’s former girlfriend, Mary Ann Shore, came forth to say Brenda Shaefer had been murdered, and that Shore knew all about it because the killing had occurred in Shore’s house, and she’d been there when it happened.
After agreeing, as had Karla Homolka, to a reduced charge and limited prison time in exchange for her testimony, Shore told investigators how Ignatow had brought the highly inhibited Shaefer to her house for a “sex therapy” session. As Ignatow alternated with Shore at his 35mm camera, recording each step, Shaefer was made to pose in a series of progressively more demeaning postures, from full-frontal upright to her knees, head bent to the floor.
Then the entire sequence of photos was exactly repeated in the nude.
Shaefer next was tied to the coffee table, where Ignatow raped her anally. Then she was taken to Shore’s bed, tied again, and raped again, repeatedly. Ignatow finally killed her
with chloroform administered to her mouth with a cloth, just as Karla Homolka, at Paul Bernardo’s instruction, had dosed her sister Tammy with the animal anesthetic.
Although Mary Ann Shore bolstered the credibility of her story by leading investigators to Brenda’s grave behind her house (which she said Ignatow had dug in advance of Shaefer’s “sex therapy”), the photos she and Ignatow took did not surface, and a jury in December of 1991 chose not to believe her testimony.
Ignatow went free.
The next month, local U.S. attorney Alan Sears hit on a new scheme for bringing the killer to justice. Sears couldn’t charge Ignatow with murder again, because of the constitutional protection against double jeopardy. But Ignatow earlier had sworn to a federal grand jury that he was innocent of murdering Brenda Shaefer. If a federal jury could be persuaded that he in fact was guilty, then perjury charges might stick.
In January 1992, a three-count federal perjury indictment was handed up against Ignatow.
In March of that year, Roy Hazelwood and BSU colleague Steve Mardigian were invited to Louisville to review the evidence, conduct a tutorial on sexual sadism for the federal prosecutors, and offer both investigative and trial strategies.
They suggested some forty leads that authorities might pursue, especially emphasizing the importance of locating and interviewing Ignatow’s previous wife and any girlfriends. Hazelwood believed they would have been forced to submit to the same degradations Shore reported.
Another recommendation was to keep searching for those pictures, because Ignatow surely had them hidden somewhere. Never mind that the house he occupied at the time of the murder had been thoroughly searched, the second time by a team of eleven highly trained search specialists. Hazelwood was adamant.
“Sexual sadists and pedophiles,” he told the lawmen, “have their own little ways of hiding things.”
Among the more creative at it was Mike DeBardeleben, the Mall Passer, who artfully secreted handguns in the walls of his house by hanging them from twine secured to boards in his attic.
In mid-October 1992, just five days before Ignatow’s perjury trial was to commence, Hazelwood’s admonition was borne out.
Ignatow by this time had sold his house, and the new owners of Ignatow’s prior residence were installing new hallway carpet. As workers took up the old carpet, they discovered beneath it a four-by-ten-inch covered heat duct. Inside, they found a Ziploc bag, taped to the side of the duct with gray duct tape. Within the Ziploc were a ring and diamond bracelet Mel Ignatow had given Brenda Shaefer, a lucky five-dollar gold piece from her father, plus three canisters of undeveloped 35mm film.
An FBI forensic photographer opined that exposed but undeveloped film stored four years in a furnace duct would be destroyed by the heat. Luckily for Ignatow’s prosecutors, he was wrong.
“The photos came out perfectly,” says Hazelwood. “Plus the duct tape matched that found binding Brenda in her grave. That is why I title this case ‘There Is a God.’ ”
Confronted with the unequivocal evidence against him, Mel Ignatow pleaded guilty and received a ninety-seven-month federal sentence for perjury. He was released on Halloween, 1997, only to be reindicted, again for perjury, and for being a persistent felon by a state grand jury in Louisville.
Paul Bernardo’s “own little way of hiding things” was to secrete the six highly incriminating videocassettes of his assaults inside an upstairs bathroom light fixture at the Port Dalhousie residence.
The videos also implicated Karla, who by that time had plea-bargained with the Canadian authorities and already had begun to serve her twelve years, waiting to testify against Bernardo.
With that testimony no longer so vital—the videos were explicit and damning—Karla’s plea bargain and relatively mild sentence came under withering public criticism. Even Crown attorney Ray Houlahan, who’d questioned Homolka as his own witness during the Bernardo prosecution, publicly denounced her in his August 1995 closing arguments. Had the videos been found before Homolka’s confession, Houlahan told a Toronto jury, Karla would have been charged with murder, as well.
“She implicated herself in first-degree murder as surely as her accomplice,” said Houlahan, who described Homolka as “definitely, definitely not a victim.”
On one level, the deal was entirely defensible. ‘The bottom line was that when she came forward they didn’t have any evidence against Bernardo,” says prosecution psychiatrist Steve Hucker.
“You might look back at it and say, ‘Oh shit! Why did we do that?’ But they really didn’t have anything else to go on at that time.”
Retired judge Patrick T. Galligan would conclude as much in his official and exhaustive
Report to the Attorney General of Ontario on Certain Matters Relating to Karla Homolka,
released in March 1996.
Attached as an appendix to the report is “Compliant Victims of the Sexual Sadist,” published in April 1993.
“I was very sceptical,” wrote Galligan in the report, “about her statements that she was subjected to violence and threats to the point where she was in such fear of him that she would do his bidding, no matter how monstrous, yet she still loved him and would not rid herself of him.”
Reading the Hazelwood-Warren-Dietz paper, however, “caused me to have an open mind on this issue, because it documents similar phenomena occurring to other women than Karla Homolka.”
Galligan amplified the point in a telephone interview. “I still have made no conclusions about Karla Homolka,” he
said, “but that paper awakened me to a phenomenon of which I was totally unaware.”
Crown psychiatrist Steve Hucker also tried to make sense of Homolka and what she’d done. Was Karla, as Bernardo’s attorney charged in court, every bit as culpable as her husband? Or was there some other dynamic at work, some way of explaining Karla’s deadliness as a consequence of Paul’s?
After consulting informally by telephone with Hazelwood, and spending twelve hours with Homolka, Hucker made up his mind.
“Basically, I saw her in the same light that I believed Roy would,” he says. “There were some anomalies, but I don’t dispute the general dynamic. That was there.
“All we were willing to say was that she was more likely to be the accomplice than the initiator. Of course, Bernardo’s attorney was trying to show the exact opposite. That she was just as nasty a specimen, and just as capable of killing as he.”
Hucker’s still not entirely certain he understands Karla Homolka.
“I think she probably fit Hazelwood’s idea,” he says. “But no one has ever said she was a complete victim in this case. I think everyone has lingering doubts about Karla. Was this just a clever young woman, more clever than all of us? That’s part of the enduring enigma.”
There are two widely published images of Karla Homolka. One captures her as a luminous bride on her wedding day in June 1991. Sitting next to her smiling husband, Karla seems beatifically content in the photo.
The second picture was taken at St. Catharines General Hospital soon after she’d finally fled Bernardo in early January 1993.
According to records, Karla arrived in the emergency room with most of her body covered with bruises. Her battered legs were too painful for her to move them. There were huge contusions on her head, which the attending physician noted was soft to the touch. Doctors also found a puncture
wound on her right thigh, which Homolka said Bernardo had inflicted with a screwdriver.
In the color picture taken that day, Homolka is clad in a hospital gown. She appears exhausted and disheveled. Circling her downcast eyes are huge black circles, known as “raccoon eyes,” which are diagnostic of severe blows to the back of the head.
What occurs is a so-called contra coup. The victim’s brain is slammed forward by the trauma—in this case a series of smashes from Bernardo’s flashlight. As the organ collides violently with the front of the skull it produces raccoonlike circles of dark hemorrhages beneath the tissue surrounding the eyes.
Both images were fresh in Roy Hazelwood’s mind as he and Ron Mackay pulled up in front of Kingston’s aging stone-and-brick Prison for Women that August Tuesday in 1996. The rain was coming down more steadily now, and a knot of prison employees stood huddled near the front gate, taking a last few drags on their cigarettes before heading inside for work.
After showering that morning, Roy had carefully dressed in a conservative suit, white shirt, quiet tie, and expertly polished shoes, his standard uniform for prison interviews.
While lockups hardly are formal environments, Hazelwood always takes care with his wardrobe on interview trips. “The reason for the suit and tie is simple,” he says. “People have an expectation of what an FBI agent should look like. Also—and this is very important—it differentiates you. They are the prisoner, and you are not.”