Paul Bernardo

Paul Bernardo's father, Kenneth, fondled a girl and was charged with child molestation in 1975, and he also sexually abused his daughter.[2] Bernardo's mother, depressed about her husband's abuse, withdrew from family life and lived in the basement of their home in Scarborough, in eastern Metropolitan Toronto.

In his book Lethal Marriage, Nick Pron describes the young Bernardo: "He was always happy. A young boy who smiled a lot. And he was so cute; with his dimpled good looks and sweet smile, that many of the mothers just wanted to pinch him on the cheek whenever they saw him. He was the perfect child they all wanted; polite, well mannered, doing well in school, so sweet in his Boy Scout uniform."[3] Beneath the charming facade, however, Bernardo had developed dark sexual fantasies and enjoyed humiliating women in public and beating women he dated.[4] When Bernardo was 16, his mother told him that he was conceived illegitimately during an extramarital affair. Disgusted, he began openly insulting her.[4]

Bernardo attended Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute in Scarborough,[4] and then went to University of Toronto Scarborough in 1982,[4] and worked for Amway, whose sales culture deeply affected him: "He bought the books and tapes of famous motivational get-rich-and-famous experts."[5] Bernardo and his friends practised pickup techniques on young women they met in bars, and were fairly successful.[6] In October 1987, he met Karla Homolka, and they were sexually attracted to each other almost immediately. Unlike the other women he knew, she encouraged his sadistic sexual behaviour. Bernardo was keenly interested in the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho, and "read it as his Bible".[7]

Bernardo committed multiple sexual assaults, escalating in viciousness, in and around Scarborough.[8] He attacked most of his victims after stalking them as they got off buses late in the evening.

Known incidents are:

• May 4, 1987: Rape of a 21-year-old Scarborough woman in front of her parents' house, after Bernardo followed her home.
• May 14, 1987: Rape of a 19-year-old woman in the backyard of her parents' house.
• July 17, 1987: Attempted rape of a young woman. Although he beat the victim, he abandoned the attack when she fought back.
• September 29, 1987: Attempted rape of a 15-year-old girl. Bernardo broke into a house in Scarborough and entered the victim's bedroom. He jumped on her back, put his hand over her mouth, threatened her with a knife, bruised the side of her face and bit her ear. Bernardo fled when the victim's mother entered the room and screamed. 19 years old at the time of the crime, Anthony Hanemaayer was convicted of the sexual assault in 1989 and served a sixteen-month prison sentence, but was exonerated after Bernardo admitted to the crime in 2006.[9]
• December 16, 1987: Rape of a 15-year-old girl. The next day Metropolitan Toronto Police issued a warning to women in Scarborough traveling alone at night, especially those riding buses.
• December 23, 1987: Rape of a 17-year-old girl with a knife he used to threaten his victims. At this point, he began to be known as the Scarborough Rapist.
• April 18, 1988: Bernardo attacked a 17-year-old girl.
• May 25, 1988: Bernardo was nearly caught by a uniformed Metro Toronto investigator staking out a bus shelter. Although the investigator noticed Bernardo hiding under a tree and pursued him on foot, he escaped.
• May 30, 1988: Rape of an 18-year-old woman in Mississauga, Ontario, about 40 kilometres (25 mi) southwest of Scarborough.
• October 4, 1988: Attempted rape in Scarborough. Although his intended victim fought him off, he inflicted two stab wounds to her thigh and buttock which required 12 stitches.
• November 16, 1988: Rape of an 18-year-old woman in the backyard of her parents' house
• November 17, 1988: Metro Police formed a task force to capture the Scarborough Rapist.
• December 27, 1988: Attempted rape, with a neighbor chasing Bernardo off.
• June 20, 1989: Attempted rape; the young woman fought, and her screams alerted neighbors. Bernardo fled with scratches on his face.
• August 15, 1989: Rape of a 22-year-old woman.
• November 21, 1989: Rape of a 15-year-old girl Bernardo saw in a bus shelter.
• December 22, 1989: Rape of a 19-year-old woman.
• May 26, 1990: Rape of a 19-year-old woman. His victim's vivid recollection of her attacker enabled police to create a computer composite portrait, which was released two days later by police and published in Toronto and area newspapers.
• July 1990: Two months after police received tips that Bernardo resembled the Scarborough Rapist composite, he was interviewed by two police detectives.

Shortly after Tammy Homolka's funeral her parents left town and Lori visited her grandparents in Mississauga, leaving the house empty. According to author Stephen Williams, during the weekend of January 12, 1991, Bernardo abducted a girl, took her to the house, raped her while Homolka watched and dropped her off on a deserted road near Lake Gibson. Bernardo and Homolka called her "January girl".[10]

At about 5:30 a.m. on April 6, 1991, Bernardo abducted a 14-year-old who was warming up as coxswain for a local rowing team. The girl was distracted by a blonde woman who waved at her from her car, enabling Bernardo to drag her into the shrubbery near the rowing club. He sexually assaulted her and forced her to remove her clothes and wait five minutes (during which he disappeared).[10]

Derek Finkle's 1997 book No Claim to Mercy[13] presented evidence tying Bernardo to the murder of Elizabeth Bain, who disappeared on June 19, 1990 (three weeks after the last known attack of the Scarborough Rapist). Bain told her mother that she was going to "check the tennis schedule" at the University of Toronto Scarborough; three days later, her car was found with a large bloodstain on the back seat.

Robert Baltovich, who has consistently maintained his innocence, was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of his girlfriend on March 31, 1992. At trial, his lawyers suggested that the then-unidentified Scarborough Rapist was responsible for the crime. Baltovich served eight years of a life sentence before he was released pending appeal. In September 2004 his appeal was processed, with his lawyers alleging that he had been wrongfully convicted and Bernardo was guilty of the murder.[14] The Court of Appeal for Ontario set aside Baltovich's conviction on December 2, 2004, but on July 15, 2005, the Attorney General of Ontario announced that he would face a new trial. On April 22, 2008, after a series of pretrial motions (including the presentation of evidence implicating Bernardo in Bain's murder), Crown prosecutor Philip Kotanen told the court that he would call no evidence and asked the jury to find Baltovich not guilty of second-degree murder.

On March 29, 1992, Bernardo stalked and videotaped two sisters from his car and followed them to their parents' house; the sisters incorrectly recorded his licence-plate number. One sister reported the incident to the NRP on March 31, 1992, and received an incident number to report further information. With French under Homolka's guard on April 18, 1992, Bernardo went out to buy dinner and rent a movie. He was spotted by one of the sisters, who attempted to track him to his house. Although she lost him, she got a better description of his licence plate and car and reported them to police. Her information was mishandled by police, falling into the "black hole" to which Judge Archie Campbell referred in the Campbell Report of 1996 (an inquiry into police mishandling of evidence in the case).

In 2006, Bernardo confessed to at least 10 more sexual assaults dating to March 1986,[15] including the 1987 assault of a 15-year-old girl. Another man, Anthony Hanemaayer, had been convicted of the assault and served a full sentence for it. On June 25, 2008, the Court of Appeal for Ontario overturned the conviction and exonerated Hanemaayer.[9]

Homolka and Bernardo were questioned by police several times in connection with the Scarborough Rapist investigation, Tammy Homolka's death, and Bernardo's stalking of other women before the death of French. The officer filed a report, and on 12 May 1992 an NRP sergeant and constable briefly interviewed Bernardo. The officers decided that he was an unlikely suspect, although Bernardo admitted that he had been questioned in connection with the Scarborough rapes. Three days later, the Green Ribbon Task Force was created to investigate the murders of Mahaffy and French. Bernardo and Homolka had applied to have their names legally changed to Teale, which Bernardo had taken from the serial killer in the 1988 film Criminal Law. At the end of May, John Motile (an acquaintance of Smirnis and Bernardo) reported Bernardo as a possible murder suspect.

In December 1992, the Centre of Forensic Sciences finally began testing DNA samples provided by Bernardo two years earlier. On 27 December, he severely beat Homolka on the limbs, head and face with a flashlight. Claiming that she had been in an automobile accident, the severely-bruised Homolka returned to work on 4 January 1993. Her skeptical co-workers called her parents, and although they rescued her the following day by physically removing her from the house, Homolka went back in, frantically searching for something. Her parents took her to St. Catharines General Hospital, where she gave a statement to the NRP that she was a battered spouse and filed charges against Bernardo. He was arrested, and later released on his own recognizance. A friend who found Bernardo's suicide note intervened, and Homolka moved in with relatives in Brampton.

Bernardo was tried for the murders of French and Mahaffy in 1995, and his trial included detailed testimony from Homolka and videotapes of the rapes. Bernardo testified that the deaths were accidental, later claiming that his wife was the actual killer. On September 1, 1995, Bernardo was convicted of a number of offences, including the two first-degree murders and two aggravated sexual assaults, and sentenced to life in prison without parole for at least 25 years.[21] He was designated a dangerous offender, making him unlikely to ever be released.[21]

In a plea bargain (a 12-year sentence for manslaughter), Homolka testified against Bernardo in his murder trial.[22] The plea bargain was criticized by many Canadians, since Bernardo's first defence lawyer (Ken Murray) withheld videotapes for 17 months. They were considered crucial evidence, and prosecutors said that they would never have agreed to the plea bargain if they had seen the tapes. Murray was later acquitted of obstruction of justice and faced a disciplinary hearing by the Law Society of Upper Canada.[23][24]

Although Bernardo was kept in the segregation unit at Kingston Penitentiary for his own safety, he was attacked and harassed; he was punched in the face by another inmate when he returned from a shower in 1996. In June 1999, five convicts tried to storm his segregation range and a riot squad used gas to disperse them.[25]

The Toronto Star reported on February 21, 2006, that Bernardo admitted sexually assaulting at least 10 other women in attacks not previously attributed to him. Most were in 1986, a year before what police called the reign of terror by the Scarborough Rapist. Authorities suspected Bernardo in other crimes, including a string of rapes in Amherst, New York, and the drowning of Terri Anderson in St. Catharines,[26] but he has never acknowledged his involvement. Bernardo's lawyer, Anthony G. Bryant, reportedly forwarded the information to legal authorities in November 2005.[27]

In 2006, Bernardo gave a prison interview suggesting that he had reformed and would make a good parole candidate.[28][29] He became eligible to petition a jury to be allowed to apply for early parole in 2008 under the faint hope clause (since he committed multiple murders before the 1997 criminal-code amendment), but did not do so. In 2015, Bernardo became eligible (and applied) for day parole in Toronto. According to the victims' lawyer, Tim Danson, it is unlikely that Bernardo will ever be released from prison because of his dangerous offender status.[30] In September 2013, he was moved from Kingston Penitentiary (which was closing) to Millhaven Institution in Bath, Ontario, where he is reportedly segregated from the other inmates.[31]

Bernardo scored 35 out of 40 on the Psychopathy Checklist, a psychological assessment tool used to assess the presence of psychopathy in individuals.[32] This is classified as clinical psychopathy.[33] In November 2015, Bernardo self-published A MAD World Order, a violent, fictional, 631-page e-book on Amazon.[34] By November 15, the book was reportedly an Amazon bestseller, but was removed from the website due to a public outcry.[35]

In October 2018, Bernardo had been set to go to trial for possession of a "shank" weapon while incarcerated (a 5 cm long screw attached to a pen). However, the prosecution dropped the charges due to their determination that there was no reasonable probability of conviction.[36]

Bernardo became eligible for parole in February 2018.[37] On 17 October 2018, he was denied day and full parole by the Parole Board of Canada.[38]

After Bernardo's 1995 conviction, the Ontario lieutenant governor appointed Archie Campbell to review the roles played by the police services during the investigation. In his 1996 report, Campbell found that lack of coordination, cooperation and communications by police and other elements of the judicial system contributed to a serial predator "falling through the cracks".[39] One of Campbell's key recommendations was for an automated case-management system for Ontario’s police services to use in investigations of homicides and sexual assaults. Ontario is the only place in the world with this type of computerized case-management network. Since 2002, all municipal police services and the Ontario Provincial Police have had access to PowerCase.[39]

Episodes of Law & Order ("Fools for Love", season 10),[40] Law & Order: Special Victims Unit ("Damaged", season 4), Close to Home ("Truly, Madly, Deeply", season 2) and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2007's "Know Thine Enemy") were inspired by the case. Under the Canadian publication ban in force at the time, "Fools for Love" could not be shown on Canadian television when it aired on February 23, 2000. The second episode of The Mentalist concerned a respectable, murderous husband-and-wife team. The Criminal Minds episode "Mr. and Mrs. Anderson" contains a serial-killer couple loosely based on Bernardo and Homolka, and the Bernardo case was mentioned by the Behavioral Analysis Unit team when they delivered their profile to the local police. Dark Heart, Iron Hand, an MSNBC documentary rebroadcast as "To Love and To Kill" on MSNBC Investigates, concerned the case.[41][42] In 2004, producers from Quantum Entertainment (a Los Angeles-based production company) announced the release of Karla, with the working title Deadly.[43] The 1993 Rush song "Nobody's Hero" references the murder of a young girl in Port Dalhousie, drummer Neil Peart's hometown.[44]

• List of serial killers by country

• Crosbie, Lynn (1997). Paul's Case: The Kingston Letters. Insomniac Press. ISBN 1-895837-09-X. Paul Bernardo.
• Williams, Stephen (2004). Karla: A Pact with the Devil. Seal Books. ISBN 0-7704-2962-9.

• Fowles, Stacey May (December 2013). "Boy Next Door". The Walrus. 10 (10). Retrieved January 8, 2014.