Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (28 page)

After Tammy’s death, the Homolkas wanted their home to themselves in order to complete their grieving. Karel Homolka had taken the death especially badly and was unable to go to work. And Lori, who had told
Karla and Paul not to give Tammy any more alcohol that night, no longer wanted Paul in the house.

The Homolkas asked Paul to go back to his parents, a place he hated. He agreed to leave but then Karla said she was leaving too. Later she’d say that she only went to stop Paul telling her parents the truth about Tammy’s death - but this doesn’t make sense as he was enjoying life with his various girlfriends and had no wish to confess and go to jail.

The Homolkas also suggested that Karla and Paul postpone their wedding, as they could no longer afford it. They similarly went around telling everyone that they couldn’t afford Tammy’s funeral - but within weeks Dorothy had got herself a new car and Karel purchased a new van. But a determined Karla had spent the last three years dreaming of her wedding day, and refused to cancel it.

In late January they moved into their new house, a palatial residence that they got for a reasonable rent because the owner’s didn’t want it left vacant. Karla would write to a friend at length about the house’s decor, a letter which was in turns vain and superficial or filled with rage at the fact that she and Paul were now paying for their wedding by themselves.

Yet she and Paul weren’t totally oblivious to the horror that they’d caused. Both lost weight after Tammy’s death and Paul behaved very strangely at the funeral, stroking the dead girl’s hair and crooning how much
he’d loved her. Karla would later say that she knew she could never leave Paul now because they shared this terrible secret between them - and if he told her parents they might never speak to her again.

Not that, to friends, it looked as if she wanted to leave her attractive fiance. She continually wrote to them about how brilliant Paul was, conveniently forgetting that he often chatted up other women in her presence and that he was increasingly calling her names. He even called her a bitch in front of her parents - but his tone was light and no one remarked on it.

If appearances were indeed everything to Karla, you’d have expected her to leave now that Paul had started to belittle her in public. Instead, she seemed to blame herself for each supposed fault that he found in her and wrote him notes of apology almost every day. She would tell him again and again that she loved him and that he was her master, he was the king.

But the king soon failed his accountancy exams because he partied when he should have been studying. Paul then gave up work rather than resit the exams, telling anyone who would listen that he was going to become a rap singer instead. He was showing the classic serial killer traits; an underachiever with majestic plans. Karla seems to have bought into her fiance’s latest boast, so that it became a shared delusion, and began telling friends that he’d soon top the charts.

Paul now made his money solely from smuggling
cheap American cigarettes into Canada, something he’d done part time for several years. He often took Karla with him so that they looked like two young
people
crossing to the states for a special evening’s romance. He also went smuggling with a male friend and kept the authorities from becoming suspicious by constantly changing their vehicle’s number plates.

Paul would go out late at night and steal new plates, peeping into girl’s windows on these journeys and watching them undressing. (Just as Ken, the man he’d originally thought of as his father, had done.) He told Karla about some of these escapades, but she didn’t seem to mind. At least one writer has suggested that she was happy as long as he stayed with her, sharing his erotic fantasies rather than acting them out alone. On the surface, Karla had what she desired - a good looking man and a pretty house in an excellent neighbourhood.

Paul was bringing lots of smuggling money to the relationship but he spent as freely as he made, often picking up the restaurant tab when they went out for expensive meals with other couples. He bought
designer
clothes and state of the art stereo equipment, went on exotic holidays and enjoyed fine wines. Eventually he ran up such huge bills on all of his credit cards that he had to declare himself bankrupt. Now the only official income they had was Karla’s wage. Her upwardly mobile accountant had become an unemployed
bankrupt smuggler, yet still she stayed by him and made increasingly lavish wedding plans.

Three weeks after Tammy’s death, the couple videoed themselves naked in Karla’s house and Karla was heard to say ‘I loved it when you fucked my little sister.’ She added that she felt proud and happy when he raped Tammy, that they could abduct a girl every weekend. Karla had discovered that she enjoyed lesbian sex with an unconscious victim and knew that it made her daring - and hopefully irresistible - in Paul’s eyes.

In the summer of 1991 Karla delivered another virgin to Paul in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl whom she’d known when she worked at the pet store. Tammy had died after being drugged by Karla - yet Karla was prepared to drug this unsuspecting teenager for Paul to rape and for herself to enjoy. She gave their visitor the same drugs and anaesthetic that she’d given her little sister, knowing that one of the side effects was vomiting as described in her work’s animal compendium. The unconscious girl was then raped by Paul and sexually assaulted by Karla, the camcorder recording the entire event.

Karla is seen to finger the girl, a virgin - and was
later to clean the blood off her before she woke up. When the girl awoke she hurt all over and thought she had flu. She had no reason to suspect her older friend Karla, a fellow animal lover, who treated her in a sisterly way.

Just prior to staging this rape, Karla had found out that Paul was dating another woman and he’d admitted he was thinking of breaking off their engagement. It’s possible that she brought him this new virgin to keep him close to home.

But another video shows her drugging a young girl by herself at a time when the courts would later determine Paul wasn’t present. Karla holds the cloth drenched with anaesthetic over the already drugged teenager’s face and is seen to reapply it frequently. She caresses the teenager’s body and inserts the unconscious fingers into her own vagina. She clearly enjoys having a helpless girl to use as a masturbatory aid.

Paul would procure the next teenager for himself whilst Karla slept - but she would take part in various assaults on the terrified fourteen-year-old. Paul found the girl by chance when he went driving in a different area, planning to steal yet another set of car number plates.

He parked and started wandering around a nice housing estate. It was around 3 am so he was surprised to find a schoolgirl, Leslie Mahaffy, sitting outside her house in the darkness. They got chatting and she admitted that her parents had locked her out for not keeping to her curfew and that she was too scared to wake them up.

After a few minutes she asked for a cigarette and Paul said he had some in his car. She followed the handsome man back to his vehicle, but was cautious when he invited her to sit inside. She sat on the front seat but kept her legs on the ground outside. It was then that Paul produced the knife and told her to get into the vehicle properly if she didn’t want to die. (She’d have been more likely to survive if she’d screamed loudly and struggled hard at this moment rather than risk being driven to a quiet place of the abductor’s choice.)

Leslie immediately complied with her abductor’s demands and was driven to the pretty home that Paul shared with Karla. He went upstairs, woke his fiancee and told her of his new trophy, Karla’s main comment was ‘Did anybody see you?’ She would later admit that she soon went back to sleep. Again and again Karla’s behaviour would show that her conscience was completely missing. She lacked the ability to empathise, a classic psychopathic trait.

Later Karla joined Paul in the room where he was
keeping the terrified teen. The constantly-blindfolded Leslie, who had by now been raped by Paul multiple times, was glad at first to hear a female voice and asked Karla to help her. But Karla merely held the camcorder whilst the teenager was sodomised.

Karla also helped Lesley into position so that the kidnapped teenager could give Paul analingus. A few minutes after that, with Paul still directing, Karla performed oral sex on the naked child. She would later say that the younger girl was acting on automatic pilot, clearly trying to distance her mind from the ordeal.

Leslie repeatedly asked to go home, saying that she missed her baby brother. She swore that she hadn’t seen what they looked like and said she couldn’t remember anything about the car that had brought her to their home.

As she couldn’t identify Karla and had only seen Paul for a few moments, they could, in theory, have let her go - but at this moment (Karla would later say) Paul confessed to her that he was the man known as the Scarborough Rapist. This rapist had been responsible for vaginally and anally raping numerous women. One woman had seen Paul’s face and as a result a police artist had produced a good likeness which was reproduced in all the local papers. Some people who knew Paul - and had heard him talk misogynistically on many occasions - had then anonymously phoned the police suggesting it was him. Paul had been taken in for
questioning and had given body samples. He knew the net was closing in.

By sheer chance it would take police two years to test all of the samples they’d taken from potential suspects, so Paul was to remain free for that period. But ultimately if the same DNA was found in semen in Leslie’s body it would point to him.

Paul wanted to keep Leslie as a teenage sex slave for as long as possible as he was enjoying himself. But Karla’s parents were due at their house for dinner forty-eight-hours after the kidnapping so Karla wanted the girl out of the way before then.

Left alone with Karla whilst Paul was out buying them all a takeaway, Leslie pleaded for her life, saying that the two of them could escape together. She added that she’d tell the police that only Paul was responsible, that he’d forced Karla to participate.

As a supposed mercy act, Karla gave Leslie two sedatives and handed her a teddy bear to hold. When the teenager was suitably drugged, Paul allegedly returned and entered the room holding an electric cord. Leslie’s actual murder wasn’t recorded on the camcorder so the details aren’t fully known and are still a source of discord. What is certain is that Lesley died that day at either Paul or Karla’s hand.

Karla would say that Paul strangled the girl, that she revived and that he re-strangled her, but the body would show few signs of pressure on the neck to
confirm this. Paul would claim that he came back from buying the takeaway to find that Karla had murdered Leslie, claiming that the girl had tried to run away. Bruising found in the deep tissue would suggest that someone of approximately Karla’s size could have knelt on the girl’s back, pushing her head into a cushion to suffocate her.

The corpse would remain in the basement whilst everyone enjoyed a home cooked meal at Paul and Karla’s house. The young couple chatted happily to Karla’s parents and gave no sign that anything was amiss.

Two days after Leslie’s death Karla and Paul dismembered the teenager’s body. She would deny taking part in this - but she had attended animal autopsies and knew how to cut up a cadaver. Karla had written to a friend saying how ‘neat’ it was to amputate puppies tails without anaesthetic and she later cut up their pet iguana after Paul killed it, barbecued it and ate it with him and her friends.

One or both of the couple cut up Leslie’s corpse with an electric saw, then put each section into a box which Paul filled with concrete. The hair was sticking out of the concrete block containing the head so he painted it
black to make it look less conspicuous. Finding he had some unused concrete left over, he took it back to the store and got a refund then realised that the concrete - and its bloody cargo - might be traced back to him.

That night he and Karla drove to a stretch of water and threw the blocks over the bridge. They assumed that they’d sink forever. But within a few weeks the water at that particular point would become shallow and a fisherman would make a very grisly find…

On 17th June 1991 Karla married Paul in an expensive and showy white wedding. As they celebrated, a concrete block containing the torso of Leslie Mahaffy was found by a fisherman. The police rushed to pull other blocks containing her head and butchered limbs from the lake. They knew that carrying the blocks would have required two people, but presumed the killers were both men.

Karla looked beautiful on her wedding day and Paul looked composed and handsome. Her father, in contrast, was clearly still grief stricken over Tammy’s death and mentioned her during his speech. Paul’s mother caused a scene about the menu and Paul told her to fuck off.

Some friends of Karla’s would later state that she
had a bruised left arm at the ceremony - and that they’d seen other bruises on her back when she was fitted for her wedding dress. But Karla would shrug these off as injuries sustained at the vets whilst trying to control large dogs.

The couple set off on their honeymoon, taking the inevitable camcorder with them. Karla would later state that she was beaten during this period - but videos show her dressed in a bikini without visible marks and on her return she told friends that the honeymoon had been brilliant. On the videotapes she looks happy and relaxed and not at all afraid of Paul, at one stage telling him she’s bored with being filmed. She appears in another video whilst he’s out of the room declaring her undying love for him.

After their return, boredom soon set in. Karla would work and Paul would lie around the house thinking up rap lyrics that suggested he was superior to the rest of the planet. The couple bought themselves a Rottweiler puppy - but Karla really wanted a baby and told friends she’d get pregnant as soon as Paul earned more cash. Both of them seemed to see him as a top ten recording artiste but he didn’t even contact any record companies and would later admit that the songs were
mainly in his head. The couple told neighbours that Paul was still an accountant, so many assumed he was freelance as he was so clearly homebased.

Karla would smile at the neighbours as she walked Buddy, the loveable puppy. She was always beautifully dressed, with her hair immaculate. Paul wasn’t seen in the neighbourhood so often but when he was he’d be talking ostentatiously into his mobile phone.

The couple’s sex life continued to go downhill, with Paul finding it harder and harder to maintain an
erection
and achieve orgasm. They consequently decided to kidnap another sex slave for them both to enjoy. For several weeks they drove around looking for a likely suspect. Then one rainswept afternoon - 16th April 1992 - they saw a schoolgirl walking home on her own.

Karla called the girl over to the car. She was fifteen and her name was Kristen French. She had long hair and a wide smile, just like Leslie Mahaffy and like Karla. She was a bright and athletic teenager from a loving home.

Kristen walked over to the vehicle and Karla used the pre-arranged ploy of asking for directions. Karla then stepped out of the car and spread a map across the roof. As the fifteen-year-old stepped closer to the vehicle. Paul rushed round and tried to bundle her inside. Karla helped.

The girl fought valiantly - a woman driving past thought that she saw three people pretending to fight -
but was no match for two strong adults. When she was in the front seat, Karla grabbed her hair from the
backseat
and held it firmly as Paul drove to their home.

They dragged their victim into the house and Karla went around hiding all the phones so that Kristen couldn’t call anyone. The teenager was then raped and sodomised by Paul.

Later Karla joined in the abuse which they, as usual, captured on video. Karla can be seen undressing Kristen and performing cunnilingus on her. She runs her hands over the girl as if inspecting her. When she says ‘You’re a pretty girl’ her voice is hoarse with desire - a desire that intensifies when Kristen is made to go down on her. She can also be heard telling the fifteen-year-old when to suck Paul, how to move her hand up and down his penis and so on.

This sexual assault was to continue for the next three days, with the violence intensifying. The teenager was punched in the back by Paul and had her hair pulled when she didn’t fulfil his every command. He was trying to live out his fantasies word for word and became enraged if she said some of the right words in the wrong order. Drugged and bound each night and assaulted each day, Kristen must have become increasingly ill.

Karla is seen to perform enthusiastically in the sex sessions, and even complied when Paul told her to insert the neck of a wine bottle into Kristen’s anus. But
she hesitates when Kristen winces and doesn’t want to push it in further. Paul then takes over the abuse.

The three days passed in a bizarre mix of rape and lesbian assault, interspersed with watching ordinary videos and listening to Paul’s rap music. At one stage when Paul asked Kristen what she wanted to eat she named a takeaway outlet far away from the house. The intelligent teenager obviously knew that separating Paul from Karla was her only chance.

Whilst he was out, she begged Karla to let her go. Karla said that she daren’t. What happened next differs according to who is telling the story. Paul would say that he returned with the takeaway to find Karla crying and saying that Kristen had tried to escape and that she’d had to hit her and mistakenly killed her. Paul had left Karla in charge, holding a rubber mallet, and Paul would say that Karla had used it to bludgeon the girl about the head and face. Whatever the true story, there were deep bruises below Kristen’s eyes when her body was found and her mouth and nose had filled with her own blood.

Karla’s version would be that Paul strangled Kristen with a cord for a full seven minutes. As with Lesley’s murder, a forensic authority would later dispute this, saying there wasn’t enough damage to the throat to suggest ligature force.

Whatever the modus operandi, Kristen was killed. Karla then showered and blow dried her hair in order to look nice for going to the Homolkas. Again, she sat
through the family meal and no one noticed anything amiss. Her parents even mentioned how sad it was that Kristen was missing and commented on the massive search.

Back home, Karla douched Kristen’s vagina and anus to make sure that she got rid of any semen samples. She also cut off the girl’s hair so that any carpet fibres caught in her locks wouldn’t be traced to them.

Paul couldn’t bear to help dismember another corpse so they left her body intact, driving it to a lonely country road. Karla then helped Paul carry it to a dump. Because the means of disposal was so different to Leslie’s, police didn’t initially link the two deaths.

Four months later the couple went to Disneyworld with their beloved camcorder. At one stage Paul trains the video on a tanned Karla and asks her what she likes to do. ‘Showing off, licking little girls, making my man happy,’ she replies.