Fwd: To Know Tammy's Fate Is To Understand Karla Homolka

[Audree Flynn]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: alison...@comcast.net < alison...@comcast.net>
Date: Sep 17, 2007 8:52 AM
Subject: To Know Tammy's Fate Is To Understand Karla Homolka
To: Audree Flynn <lostc...@gmail.com>

October 10, 2000
National Post
Christie Blatchford
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Everyone forgets Tammy. It is a strange hard truth of the criminal courts that the greater the intimacy between victim and killer, the more diminished is the offence in the eyes of the law.

As stranger-on-stranger rapes are often more harshly punished than incest, as the sexual molesting of hockey players by the coach they trusted is deemed less horrific than the random attacks of the garden-variety pedophile, so somehow, in the news media and the Canadian consciousness, has the death of Tammy Homolka come to be considered less notable -- sometimes not deemed worthy of a casual mention -- than the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.

In the recent, ongoing brouhaha over Karla Homolka's transfer from an offensively cushy prison in Joliette to a relatively less luxe facility in Saskatoon, the National Post has described her as the "convicted killer of two teenage girls," The Globe and Mail yesterday said, without explanation, that she is serving "a 12-year manslaughter sentence," and only The Toronto Sun even mentioned a third victim on her plate, this with broad, whitewashed strokes that noted Homolka was "implicated" in three deaths.

Implicated, was she?

Oh, leave us to get the facts straight; they are there to be seen. And let us rouse ourselves to remember them.

To do anything less is a huge disservice to the lovely young girl, not quite 16, who died.

It is also foolhardy in the extreme, because whether or not Karla applies for parole or serves every last day of her piddling sentence, she is getting out of jail, and will be among us no later than July of the year 2005, and my hunch is she is as dangerous now as she was, two days before Christmas in 1990, to the younger sister who by all accounts loved and trusted her.

In fact, the tale of Tammy is instructive on every level. It is the story to know about Karla.

It tells you everything you should need to know.

It speaks to the fact that whatever is wrong with her was wrong with her long before she ever met Paul Bernardo -- and likely remains wrong with her. It even captures a little about her parents, whose arguably stoic standing by Karla -- and this sort of "family support" is usually considered by Corrections Canada to be a factor that augurs well for rehabilitation -- is born in their deliberate, stubborn blindness.

None of the convoluted psychiatric testimony later offered up to explain Karla's conduct in the abduction, torture and sexual depravity with Ms. Mahaffy and Ms. French -- that she was in Bernardo's thrall; that she was herself a battered woman -- has any relevance to Tammy.

In the fall of 1990, Karla was merely engaged to Bernardo. He lived in Toronto, she lived in St. Catharines with her family. She was in as secure a milieu as exists for a young woman: s urrounded by friends, working and earning her own money, on her home turf. They saw one another only on weekends.

In her own magnificent words, when Bernardo first suggested he would like to have sex with her young sister, Karla "was totally against the idea." But as he badgered and badgered her, she came to see that it would be just the one time -- oh well then -- and soon she was putting her fine mind to the problem of how to serve Tammy up.

Tellingly, she never gave any thought to the possibility her sister would consent; Karla knew this was abhorrent, and that normal people would have no part of it. She has never had any difficulty recognizing right from wrong.

She went about it carefully. Hmmm. First, she read up on what were the best drugs for doping people; she worked in a veterinarian's office, so this was easy. Hmmmm. Halothane, a liquid animal anesthetic, sounded good. Hmmmm. She stole some. Hmmmm. She got some pills to make Tammy sleepy first. She and Bernardo bought a videocamera so that they could record the assault.

Come late on the evening of Dec. 23, in the Homolka rec room, amid the happy bustle of the holiday season, Bernardo whispered that this was the night. He crushed up the sleeping pills and put them in Tammy's drinks; the combination of the pills and the unaccustomed liquor made the young girl drowsy, thick-tongued. She was slurring her words.

When the rest of the family went to bed, leaving the three alone in the basement, Bernardo and Karla moved.

Tammy had dozed off on the couch; Karla touched her on the shoulder to make sure she was out, then retrieved her supplies, put some Halothane on a cloth, and held it over Tammy's face. Bernardo removed the girl's clothes, and began videotaping himself as he raped her. He told Karla to strip, and she did.

At his instructions, grumbling now and then that she was disgusted, Karla sexually assaulted her sister, groping, licking and penetr ating her.

Moments later, early on Christmas Eve morning, Tammy vomited, and choked to death.

Bernardo and Karla lied so well to the police who came, and to her parents, that Tammy's death was officially deemed an accident and remained so until, negotiating her plea bargain with the Crown years later, Karla coughed it up as a little extra for the prosecutors, as proof of her good intentions.

Within weeks of Tammy's death, in January of 1991, Karla was writing her friends, bitter that her parents were still grieving over her sister, and now wanted her and Bernardo to postpone their wedding, or at least scale it down. "F*** my parents," she wrote Debbie Purdie. "They are being so stupid. Only thinking of themselves." Of her father, she crowed, "He's wallowing in his own misery and f***ing me!"

Between Jan. 12 and 16 that same year, with her parents out of town and Tammy barely cold in the ground, Karla and Bernardo videotaped two long sex scenes. Some of these were filmed in Tammy's bedroom, in and around her bed, covered with her stuffed toys. Karla wore her dead sister's clothes, assumed Tammy's high, young-girl voice, and said, "I loved it when you took her virginity."

Now, there's no doubt Karla's criminal complicity in Tammy's death gave him a hammer over her -- though of course, little-considered, it also put one of the same weight in her hand, to use over him -- and the prosecutors and their expert witnesses later convinced the jurors that it was this horrible secret which propelled her giddily along in the abductions, torture and sexual assaults committed upon Ms. Mahaffy and Ms. French and, ultimately, convinced them that it was Bernardo who had actually killed the two girls.

But never could anyone, Karla herself included, properly explain how, as a self-sufficient young woman decidedly not in Bernardo's clutches, she chose to give over Tammy to him in the first place. Yet this was the act -- voluntary; cavalier; dispassionate; self-serving -- from which all others flowed.

This is who she was.

From all the available evidence, it is who she remains.

In prison, as the pictures that appeared in the Post last month so beautifully illustrate, she plays dressup with other convicted sex offenders, looking very much as she did years ago both on videotape and in court -- playful, sexualized, supremely confident. She resists psychiatric evaluation -- the reason she has been transferred to Saskatoon is to make her available to the doctors -- because, her lawyer says, she is content to serve out her full sentence, and thus one isn't necessary.

The lawyer may be right, too: It is already plain what Karla Homolka is.

She is what she was at 19, beyond the reach of all societal norms and moral codes, beyond the pull of family, beyond even the older sibling's instinctive need to protect the younger one, the one who trails a few feet behind in mute adoration. Warm blood does not circulate in her small lush body.

Yet curiously, just like her parents, who sat in court for all Karla's testimony at Bernardo's trial but for her evidence about Tammy, at which points they would either leave the courtroom or cover their ears -- we choose not to look too closely.

That long summer of the trial, the Homolkas sat in front of me in court. I remember thinking I could have understood their support of this daughter, if only they had had the courage to face the truth of her. I would never have guessed, then, that we would all take our cues from them, and look away.