Fwd: Ninety minutes not enough time to explain Homolka's prison deal

[Audree Flynn]

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From: Audree Flynn <lostc...@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 23, 2007 10:59 PM
Subject: Fwd: Ninety minutes not enough time to explain Homolka's prison deal
To: g www <dedeb...@yahoo.com>

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From:  <alison...@comcast.net>
Date: Nov 23, 2007 9:54 AM
Subject: Ninety minutes not enough time to explain Homolka's prison deal
To: Audree Flynn < lostc...@gmail.com>





Ninety Minutes Not Enough Time To Explain Homolka's Prison Deal

Wade Hemsworth  June 30, 1995 The Hamilton Spectator



Ninety minutes was all it took yesterday for the Crown to question
Karla Homolka about the deal she made to trade the deaths of three
girls for 12 years in jail.

In her ninth day as a witness for the prosecution, after nearly two
working weeks describing how Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen
French all died after sex attacks by her and her former husband, Paul
Bernardo, Karla Homolka started talking about the deal at 12.06
yesterday afternoon.

By 1.36, she was done.

Crown attorney Ray Houlahan had taken eight days to lead her through
the first eight of her nine segments of testimony -- from meeting Paul
to leaving him, and all the savagery in between.

Throughout, his questioning was methodical -- so detailed and
repetitious that it became almost exasperating.

But on reaching the final section -- the one that has so puzzled and
enraged so many of the citizens that the Crown's office serves - - Mr.
Houlahan breezed through two and a half years of plea- bargaining,
bail-granting, coaching and other comforts allowed to this woman since
she left that house on Bayview Drive to save her own life, after
ignoring three others.

Even Homolka herself admits that her punishment is "not nearly enough"
for what she has done.

It's apparent that what Karla says is important to the Crown's
double-murder case against Paul Bernardo.

Still, she is a killer of innocent girls, and the Crown owes us an
explanation for the deal it struck with her and then presented for a
judge's approval before it was sealed from view in a sweeping
publication ban.

What we got when the veil came off the negotiations yesterday, fellow
Canadians, was a frame without a picture.

Ninety minutes. About the time it took to drive Karla from her
parents' house in St. Catharines to her aunt and uncle's house in
Brampton, once she was let out of hospital following her last beating.

Hardly enough time to explain how -- supposedly filled with more than
two years' worth of shame, sorrow, regret and fear -- she went out
dancing, met a new guy and soon became "intimate" with him.

Ninety minutes. About one minute for each hour Leslie and Kristen
spent in abject horror and degradation while they were held as "sex
slaves."

Not enough time to describe all the clothes Karla bought with her
pogey cheques once she was out of that house and into some place safe.

Not enough time to tell us that she has been testifying about all
this, not because she wants to come clean about the needless deaths of
three innocents, but because she has to do it. If she doesn't, she'll
end up in the same prisoner's box where her former husband now sits.

Unlike her, he is facing a life sentence if the jury believes that it
was all his idea, like she says.

Ninety minutes. Not enough time for her to go into detail about how
exactly it was that she avoided charges in the death of her own sister
-- whom she admits serving up to her fiance as a Christmas present for
him to rape.

Ninety minutes. Enough time to tell us how she has to be protected
from the other prisoners at Kingston's Prison For Women, how she has
to eat with a plastic fork and only gets an hour of sunshine every
day.

Not enough time to tell us how she's enjoying that TV in her cell and
her courses in (get this) sociology from Queen's University, working
toward the degree that she made sure three girls would never get.

Ninety minutes. Not enough time to explain what happened to her deal
when suddenly she "remembered" that bit about Jane Doe, the fourth
girl they drugged and raped, the one who had the questionable fortune
to have survived their attack.

Not enough time to say how the Crown law office measured her recovered
memory against the document she had signed five months earlier,
promising to give a full, truthful and complete account of her time
with the accused.

Ninety minutes. A fraction of the time that defence lawyer John Rosen
is sure to spend tearing down the wall that the Crown has worked so
hard to build.