"KARLA'S MORAL VACUITY"-

[lostc...@gmail.com]

"A moral vacuity in her which is difficult if not impossible to
explain": law, psychiatry and the remaking of Karla Homolka

Anne McGillivray

Associate Professor of Law, University of Manitoba, Canada

Prefatory note

Carla Homolka and her husband Paul Bernardo were convicted in 1993 and
1995 respectively of the abduction, torture, rape and murder of two
teenage girls in the small lakeside town of St Catharine's, Ontario.
Police, lawyers and judges-indeed, the legal system itself-were
profoundly challenged by the disjunction between available scripts for
crimes of sexual violence and for women who 'go wrong'. The
fragmenting of notions of justice and agency is seen in investigation
and evidence-gathering, in the plea bargain made with Homolka and in
Bernardo's trial, which starred Homolka as witness for the prosecution
and publicly revealed for the first time the extent of her
participation in the crimes. Her sentence of 12 years concurrent was a
compromise between contested notions of women's agency, a play-off
between competing ideas about womanhood and subjectivity against male
sadism and dominance. The public uproar following Canada's 'trial of
the century' precipitated an investigation by the Ontario Attorney-
General of the Homolka plea bargain. The resulting Galligan Report and
its depiction of the relationship between Bernardo and Homolka is a
central reference point of this article.

Introduction

Fault lines in the cracking facade of Western law trace out an
increasing pluralism in legal discourse and practice. Gaps between
public and juridical perceptions of justice are widest in the high-
profile murder trials foregrounding race, sex, gender and childhood
which have consumed the last decade of the millenium. These most
famously include O.J. Simpson criminal and civil trials in the deaths
of his ex-wife and her friend, the torture and killing of baby James
Bulger by two young boys and the plea bargaining of Karla Homolka who,
like Rosemary West and Myra Hindly acted in consort with her husband
in the rape and murder of ehildren.l The ethical standards of the
legal profession show deep fracture as social fragmentation ehallenges
notions of honourable lawyering. "No holds barred" adversarial tamies
have come under Law Soeiety scrutiny, yet such tactics are routinely
viewed by criminal defence lawyers as central in their duty to
clients. Homolka's plea bargain was necessitated by an extreme
instance of such tactics-the concealing of real evidence. The
fracturing of criminal law's once-seamless discourse is manifest in
its inereasingly open reliance on the "soft" sciences of psychology,
psychiatry, psychoanalysis, criminal profiling-the "psy" disciplines
which play a central role in Homolka's ease. The case raises questions
about the relationship of law and psychiatry, agency and demonisation,
and the medicalising of evil at the close of the millennium.

Evil went out of the world at the end of the Middle Ages and madness
came in (Foucault, 1965, p.223) but Western man is more than ever a
confessing animal (Foucault, 1979). Although the confessional is now
the law office and the clinic, confession remains central to the
discipline of the soul and to the creation of the legal persona. Few
have confessed more madness or more evil for more hours to more
disciplines-police, lawyers, psychiatrists, psychologists,
psychotherapists- than Karla Homolka, partner of serial rapist and
killer Paul Bernardo. Her thousands of hours of confessions and the
professional discourses flowing from them shaped her remaking from
accused sex killer to a battered woman seduced into perversion, beaten
into murder. Her persona, constructed from psy knowledges and the
pragmatics of law, raises profound questions about law and lawyering
in a fragmented world.

Bargaining with the devil-law, domesticity and the problem of evil

Karla Homolka entered into a plea bargain with the Ontario Crown on 14
May 1993 for her part in the murder of schoolgirls Leslie Mahaffy and
Kristen French, 14 and 15, in consort with her partner Paul Bernardo.
Homolka denied inflicting death but her participation in their
abduction and assault constitutes first degree murder. Read into the
facts at the sentencing hearing was her role in the drugging, sexual
assault and death by aspiration of vomit of her sister Tammy, 15. Her
sentence, 12 years concurrent on two counts of manslaughter, was
denounced by lawyers as a "sweetheart deal", a "travesty of justice",
a "deal with the devil". A fourth adolescent victim, Jane Doe,
drugged, assaulted, forgetful but alive, was recalled to Homolka in a
post-sentence dream. The nature and extent of Homolka's involvement in
the Mahaffy and French cases was spectacularly revealed in six
homemade videotapes later recovered. There was widespread belief that
she had known where the videotapes were hidden, that she wilfully
concealed the Jane Doe incidents and, most centrally, that her claims
of being under Bernardo's control- a central tenet of the plea
bargain-
were spurious. Speculation was fed by a publicity ban on the plea
bargain which stood until Bernardo's trial. Print and website sources
imaged demonic duos, vampirism, Barbie and Ken perfect-couple
perfectmurderers, sexy "Killer Karla", the comic "Karla's Web"
featuring Homolka's psy confessions. The gaze centres, always, on
Homolka.

Bernardo was convicted of first degree murder, kidnapping, aggravated
sexual assault, forcible confinement and offering an indignity to a
dead body and was sentenced to life imprisonment in September 1995.
Homolka testified for the Crown. Responsible for the sadistic sexual
assault of dozens of adolescent girls and young women (11 victims
testified at the hearing, 23 charges were originally laid and 33 are
attributed to him by police), Bernardo was declared a dangerous
offender, having "shown a failure to control his sexual impulses and a
likelihood of his causing injury, pain or other evil to other persons
through failure in the future to control his sexual impulses" under
§753 of the Canadian Criminal Code, RSC 1985, C-46. He was sentenced
to indeterminate detention. That he would be incarcerated for his
mortal lifespan seemed a foregone conclusion. Homolka, in the popular
view, should have taken her seat beside him in the prisoner's box and
seat of ultimate evil.

Underlying the disquiet was a fear that gender somehow won, that
Homolka, being female, was held less culpable on that basis alone.
This denied women's equality and moral autonomy. Conversely, it was a
sort of witchery through pretended weakness, lies and manipulation,
the successful use by an evil woman of obnoxious female traits.2
Feminists and anti-feminists could unite in their disapprobation of
Homolka and her self-created images, first of normality-pretty teen,
party girl, beautiful bride, dutiful daughter, supportive wife-and
then of the controlled and battered woman with symptoms culled from
the Lenore Walker classic on her gaol cell bookshelf. The criminal
justice system needed Homolka's evidence to convict Bernardo, a far
more dangerous offender in the view of the prosecution. As Homolka was
herself vulnerable to prosecution for first degree murder, her
evidence had to be bought by sentencing discount. This is not unusual.
The vast majority of criminal cases in Canada are settled by way of
guilty plea, usually involving a sentence bargain and often a charge
bargain. The system depends on this "secret" of law. It is no secret
to the courts, alerted to the nature of a bargain in various ways. Nor
can it be said to be secret from the public, given high-profile cases
of immunity given to informers in organised crime and the enduring
popularity of courtroom fiction. Bargaining is often a hurried event
over the telephone, in courthouse hallways, even the courtroom itself.
These practices were criticised in Ontario in the Report of the
Attorney-General's Advisory Committee on Charge Screening, Disclosure
and Resolution Discussion (Martin, 1993, hereinafter the Martin
Report), which recommended among other things full disclosure of plea
bargain terms to the sentencing court. Even so, only in the rarest of
cases does a bargain receive the elaborate attention given Homolka's
bargain before and after the fact.

Plea bargaining is barter, with a buyer and seller and consideration
for services in the sentencing discount. Where evidence is to be
bought, the discount may extend to complete immunity, usually
available only to organised crime informants. Homolka promised full
disclosure and testimony against Bernardo in return for reduced
charges
-two counts of manslaughter-and a joint sentencing recommendation. In
so doing, she escaped central blame for the deaths. In law, Homolka
and Bernardo are equal partners in the crimes, x=y. Where x as an
informer in a case like this receives a discount in charge and
sentence to the value of a, the difference is passed on to A. The
equation is now x - a <A + a. Homolka's discount was to be justified
by the control exercised over her as battered woman in the medico-
legal diagnosis. This requires a controller whose identity can absorb
the excess blame, a. In the circumstances of Homolka's case, the
controller must be of major proportions, a pervert, a sexual sadist, a
psychopath. This is the medico-legal diagnosis of Bernardo.

Homolka's remaking is a subtle regendering to account for the problem
of evil in women. Despite long association of women with evil and
seduction into evil, actual evil in women is problematic. Women rarely
kill and their killing is typically within the domestic relationship.3
Women who participate in sex killings are so demonised that femaleness
itself becomes a perversion. Transforming Homolka from murderess to
battered woman centres domesticity and enhances womanliness. In this
therapeutic transformation from defendant to victim, from action to
passion, from agency to compliance, evil becomes the familiar.
Foregrounding the psychological webwork of relationships between
Homolka, Bernardo and the dead girls through a battered woman identity
focuses on power disparities and decentres partnership and agency.
Homolka is now to be read as a victim standing with her child victims
in Bernardo's sexual gaze, with them vulnerable to torture and death.
The battered woman construct incorporates Homolka's domestic identity-
her girlish love, marital aspirations, housekeeping, battering-in
deliberate contrast to Bernardo's extramural stalking and rapes. This
in turn foregrounds his dominance in their domestic murders. In her
domesticity, Homolka aspired to recreate herself in the image of
Bernardo's desire. Already an ageing child of 17 when they met, she
play-acted the pubescent child-woman in sex with Bernardo during the
five years they were together, to the extent of dressing in her dead
sister's clothing and answering to her name. By helping him possess
the objects of his desire, whom he had been secretly raping for years,
she hoped to maintain their relationship. However familiar are
Homolka's aspirations "to be" for Bernardo, it did not account in the
public eye for the boundaries of womanhood she transgressed.

The reconstruction strategy was meant to bolster her credibility as
prosecution witness and validate her plea bargain by discounting her
moral fault and legal blameworthiness. It was a partial reconstruction
conferring partial immunity. Homolka still had to go to gaol. Even so,
her psy identity was contested by Bernardo and ridiculed in the media.
The attenuation of justice, in the public perception, by psy sciences
recalls the deeper disciplinary fracture and the history of hegemonic
clashes between two powerful discursive fields with opposing
constitutive missions- law and psychiatry.

"A public disquiet"-psy moments and system failures

Homolka's plea bargain was necessitated by system failures in
investigation, autopsy, DNA analysis, FBI profiling and professional
ethics (Campbell, 1996).4 Psy knowledges informed by feminist analysis
of gender and victimization explained it. Was the bargain justified?
Was the sentence fit? A petition to have the bargain annulled was
signed by 300,000 Ontario residents and submitted to the Attorney-
General of Ontario. To account for the cost of purchasing Homolka's
evidence, Patrick Galligan, newly retired from the Ontario Court of
Appeal, was appointed to inquire into the circumstances, legality and
possible breach of the Homolka plea bargain. This essay follows the
narrative and structuring of events as set out in his Report to the
Attorney-General of Ontario on Certain Matters Relating to Karla
Homolka (Galligan, 1996, hereinafter the Galligan Report). Where
system failures arise in his narrative, Galligan defers to the
Bernardo Investigation Review (Campbell, 1996).5 Galligan centres on
the contested identity of Karla Homolka forged in the confessionals of
the law office and the clinic and on the pragmatics of law which
ultimately justify the bargain.

The Galligan Report considered three questions. Was the bargain
appropriate? Should Homolka be charged with the sexual assault of Jane
Doe? Should further proceedings be taken against her in the murders?6
Answers shade into one another. There is a "profound and widely felt
sense of public disquiet" (p. 7) about her avoidance of full criminal
responsibility in the murders and her late disclosure of the Jane Doe
assaults was a prima facie breach of the bargain. The Report draws
upon legal and psy discourses. Lawyers numerically play a major role.
Galligan was a criminal lawyer prior to his appointment to the bench.
He "sought out the advice of a relatively small group of lawyers, but
one which I thought was sufficiently broad to give me a wide range of
views within the profession" (p. 3) and he took as counsel a "top-
flight member of the criminal defence bar" who was also an experienced
Crown attorney (p. 6). Lawyers researched and co-wrote the report and
interviews were held with prosecutors, counsel for Homolka and
Bernardo, lawyers representing a variety of professional associations
and lawyers representing the Mahaffy, French and Doe families. Also
interviewed were a judge, three law professom and the Attorney-General
of Ontario. The Report reflects the views and work of 46 lawyers.

The only lawyers not interviewed were Ken Murray, who resigned as
Bernardo's counsel on the eve of trial, and Murray's legal counsel.
Murray faces criminal charges and Law Society disciplinary proceedings
for an act which, depending on one's view, is either a heroic or
deeply misguided piece of defence work and potentially a breach of law
and professional ethics. On 6 May 1993, when the 71-day search of the
Bernardo-Homolka house had ended, over 100 videotapes had been
reviewed on the premises (as the search warrant did not specify
removal, Campbell, 1996, p. 211) and a single police officer was on
guard, Murray entered the house together with two co-counsel, stood on
the toilet of a second-floor bathroom, reached deep into the cavity
above a recessed light fixture, removed the videotapes, put them in
his briefcase and walked out (Campbell, 1996, p. 213). The light
fixture had been removed but police had not reached far enough into
the attic cavity. Having no reason to suspect an officer of the court
of interfering with a crime scene, the police officer did not search
the briefcase. Homolka's plea bargain was sealed the following day.
The lawyer locked the tapes in his office safe, where they remained
hidden for another 16 months. The police search yielded only a blurred
segment of tape showing a nude Homolka with an unidentifiable nude
girl. Before letting her parents hospitalise her after a final
beating, Homolka searched unsuccessfully for the tapes in the garage
rafters where they had hidden Bernardo's rape paraphernalia. Without
real evidence connecting Bernardo with the murders, the remaining
option was the purchase of Homolka's testimony. Had the videotapes
been found, had Murray turned them over, there would have been no plea
bargain (Campbell, 1996, p. 220). "The tapes were crucial evidence and
the failure to find them during the search led to the plea-bargain
with Karla Homolka." Hidden in the attic cavity and the lawyer's
briefcase were the needed secrets of Bernardo's complicity. Also
hidden were images of Homolka, darker, lustier, more cruel and far
more enigmatic than those drawn in her confessions. The disappearance
of the tapes necessitated Homolka's reconstruction. Their reappearance
profoundly challenged it.

Lawyers can say what the law is, how far it can be manipulated and
whether a :

bargain is broken. There are things that lawyers cannot say which rest
at the heart

of the case. Chief Justice Brian remarked in 1477 that "The thought of
man is not

triable, for the devil himself knoweth not the heart of man" (YB
(1477) P. 17 E. 4.

2a, pl. 2).7 The psy disciplines claim some knowledge here and theirs
is the second

professional discourse in the Galligan Report. Although vastly
outnumbered by

lawyers-five psychiatrists and three psychologists are quoted or
cited-
their contri

bution to the discourse of madness and badness, sickness and guilt,
medicine and

morality, is a tie-breaker. Where law cannot account for the modicum
of difference

in Homolka's culpability, the psy disciplines do so.

Galligan dramatically begins with the account of a victim of the
mysterious Scarborough rapist. This unnamed woman, "not the first of
Paul Bernardo's victims, nor would she be the last lives with terror,
fear of being alone, and the inability to love, to trust or to lead a
normal life ... swayed between living and non-living ... exhausted
both physically, by inability to sleep, and emotionally ... indelibly
scarred for the rest of her life" (p. 7). The rapist's modus operandi
is detailed-nigh/stalking, knife and ligatures to the neck, blows
which broke one victim's arm, body scorings with a knife, vaginal
insertion of twigs and other found objects, vaginal and anal rape,
forced fellatio, death threats, female-specific insults, knife-point
repetition of scripted praise for the rapist's body parts, bone-
breaking, theft of jewelry, clothing and identification as mementos.
This foreshadows the murders of Mahaffy and French-abduction,
scripting, beatings and torture, patterned sexual practices,
possessing the victim by humiliation and the threat of death, keeping
mementos. Death becomes the ultimate possession of the object of
desire and videotapes are the perfect memento. In foregrounding
Bernardo's extramural evil, the narrative sets the stage for Homolka's
domestic exculpation. When Galligan moves on to their relationship and
her crimes, her abuse is at first a subnarrative hemmed about with
interjections of doubt, where the judicial voice falters and must
yield to psy explanations. By distancing her claims of abuse, this
rhetorical tactic enhances them. It is deployed less to proclaim
innocence than to subvert agency. The subplot of Homolka's abuse
reflects and refracts Bernardo's rapes and with them anticipates his
moral leadership in the murders. She is caught in a maelstrom of fate,
Everywoman meeting the devil. Even so, her culpability is recalled to
the reader when, at odd moments, Galligan foregrounds her moments of
choice and sharply reproves her conduct. In his omnipotent paternal
gaze, he may wish to forgive but must sternly judge.

Details of the first eight Scarborough rapes were sent to the FBI
Behavioral Sciences Unit specialising in serial rape and sexual
killings. An agent identified the assailant as a sexual sadist who
"psychologically abused his victims and used more force than necessary
to subdue them" (p. 13) and predicted that the "sadistic component"
and the rate of offending would escalate due to "a life style
change" (p. 14).8 Future victims would be kidnaped and this would
guarantee their death. Assaults would be videotaped. The rapes would
appear to end only because the rapist had moved away. He would be
stopped only by external force-death or incarceration. This oracular
prediction proved true. The predicted lifestyle change was Bernardo's
involvement with the Homolka family, enabling his move from his
parents' Toronto home to the small community of St Catherine's. The
Scarborough rapes ended, Toronto police lost interest, and St
Catharine's police failed to connect the rapes with a rape there and
with the schoolgirl murders (Campbell, 1996, Ch. 2). A police report
naming Bernardo as a suspect in the Scarborough rapes, based on a
statement from a former girlfriend, I.F., was filed 5 January 1988
(Campbell, 1996, p. 17). It was ignored.

Engagement, marriage and respectability granted Bernardo the privacy
which enabled the predicted "total physical and psychological
domination" of his victims. When Homolka met Bernardo in a hotel
restaurant in October 1987, they had sexual intercourse within an hour
or so and began dating. She was 17, in Grade 12, oldest of three
sisters. Bernardo was 22, youngest of three children, a University of
Toronto graduate. By this time he had raped at least twice and had
practiced his domestic technique on an earlier girlfriend, J.M.G.,
whom he met in 1984 when she was 16. For three years, Bernardo
"dominated and controlled" G. as "his little servant girl,
playtoy" (p. 19), isolated her from her friends, forced painful sex on
her, used handcuffs and ligatures and in November 1987 locked her in
his car, punched, beat and raped her, pulled out clumps of head and
pubic hair, raged and threatened to kill her. While he looked for his
knife "in a frenzy", G. escaped and avoided him thereafter. She had
little to worry about. Bernardo had found Homolka.

Bernardo became a Homolka family intimate. His sex with Homolka was
vaginal, he treated her "like a princess", "the only girl in the
world" (p. 21). He was considerate and attentive, he brought flowers,
took her to movies and was respectful to her parents, he went out with
Homolka and her friends and he continued his career as the Scarborough
rapist. In his December rapes that year, he made one virginal victim
kiss his penis and wish it a merry Christmas. He gave Homolka a gold
chain and a dress and began to tell her how to do her hair, what to
wear, where to go. Her friends were now stupid and immature. He
introduced her to "large amounts" of alcohol and to fellatio and
taught her such speeches as "My name is Karla, I am 17 years old, I am
your little cocksucker ..." (p. 23). The Scarborough rapes continued
and in late spring of 1988 he began anal sex with Homolka while she
wore a dog choke collar. He took pictures of her with his new Polaroid
and began beating her that summer. The Scarborough rapes continued.
His names for Homolka alternated between princess and slut, bitch or
cunt. Marriage plans went forward. They became engaged Christmas eve
1989 and by the spring of 1990, Homolka was calling herself his sex
slave.

Her abuse, she claims, escalated. (Homolka was "not to argue with
Paul, be a perfect, understanding girlfriend for Paul, remember you're
fat and you're lazy and you're ugly", her note on her mirror reminded
her).9 But here Galligan falters. "I must digress to say that I was
very sceptical 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" (p. 32). She lived with
her parents and led her friends to believe that everything was
wonderful. The study "Compliant victims of the sexual
sadist" (Hazelwood et al., 1993, discussed below) "caused me to have
an open mind on this issue because it documents similar phenomena
occurring to women other than Karla Homolka".

He resumes his narrative. In the spring of 1990, Bernardo told Homolka
of his desire for young sex slaves to be brought to her house and
ordered her to pretend to be her 15-year-old sister Tammy when they
had sex. By fall he was vaguely threatening violence if he couldn't
have Tammy, who could be drugged and would never know. Homolka could
get the drugs from the animal clinic where she worked. On 20 November
1990, Bernardo was interviewed by Toronto police on the basis of tips
received in response to an unusually accurate police drawing of the
Scarborough rapist. He confidently volunteered samples of saliva, hair
and blood and told Homolka he was not the Scarborough rapist. She
hoped that they would not "mess up" on the forensic evidence (p. 33).
These "went into a black hole" and were not DNA-tested until January
1993, over two years later (Campbell, 1996, p. 355). "The tragic
converse of these facts is that Bernado, during the 25- months his DNA
was waiting to be tested, raped four young women and raped, tortured,
and murdered two others. In hindsight, it is clear that these rapes
and murders could have been prevented if Bernardo's DNA sample had
been tested "... within 30 or even 90 days of the [threshold] serology
test" (Campbell, 1996, p. 356). On 23 December 1990, as a Christmas
present to Bernardo, Homolka drugged Tammy with Halcyion and
Halothane, tranquilizers obtained through her connection with the
veterinary clinic where she worked as an 'Animal Health
Technician' (Campbell, 1996, p. 152). She and Bernardo took turns
videotaping events and sexually assaulting her. At Bernardo's request,
Homolka cunnilinguated her and was "repulsed" (p. 83). Tammy died,
Bernardo attempted resuscitation, the drugs were flushed down the
toilet, the camera hidden, the body washed and dressed and 911 called.
In ruling the death accidental, the coroner failed to test blood and
stomach contents, examine the genital area or query a large second-
degree burn on the face (Campbell, 1996, p. 99).

Bernardo continued to live with the Homolkas until mid-January, when
her parents asked him to leave so that they could mourn in private. He
was furious and vowed never to return. He rented a pink clapboard
house on Bayview Drive and supported himself smuggling cigarettes.
Homolka said, the still-sceptical Galligan writes, that the verbal and
physical abuse continued, heightened by threats to expose her role in
the death of her sister. In another exercise of judicial finger-
shaking, again abstracting himself from his narrative, he reports that
Homolka "wrote a truly nauseating, reprehensible letter" (p. 37) to
her friend in which she criticisedher parents' selfish grieving and
proposed limits on wedding costs due to funeral expenses. Bernardo
raped again, this time in the St Catherine's area, and again ordered
Homolka to bring young girls to his house. Homolka produced Jane Doe
on 7 June 1991, a 15-year-old friend who worked at the veterinary
clinic and who regarded Homolka (as did all her victims) as an older
sister. Doe was drugged and sodomised, had no memory of the event and
its repetition, and remained the object of Bernardo's daytime
seductive attentions.

On 15 June 1991 in the early hours of the morning, Bernardo was
prowling the residential area of Burlington. He found 14-year-old
Leslie Mahaffy, gave her a cigarette, took her home, woke Homolka and
told her he had a girl. Homolka went back to sleep. The next day, he
blindfolded Mahaffy and invited Homolka in. Homolka made drinks,
whispered questions for Bernardo to ask Mahaffy, cunnilinguated her
and videotaped the rapes and beatings. She gave her sleeping pills and
her own teddy bear to hold while Bernardo strangled her. He
dismembered the body with a circular saw, encased body parts in
concrete and threw them in a lake. On their wedding day two weeks
later, the lake was lowered and the remains found. On their wedding
night he told her that he was the Scarborough rapist.

Bernardo's abuse of Homolka escalated, Galligan writes, now sounding
more sure. Bernardo began taking her on prowling trips by car while he
watched, stalked and photographed women. He repeatedly demanded that
she bring him young girls. In August, Jane Doe was again drugged and
sodomised and eventually "succumbed" to Bernardo, fellating him "on a
number of occasions" (p. 124). She ended the relationship in December
1992 and has no memory of the assaults. On 16 April 1992, 15-year-old
Kristen French was walking home from school. Homolka enticed her into
Bernardo's car. For the next three days French was bound, raped,
sodomised, beaten and forced to perform sexual acts while feigning
enjoyment for the videocamera. Homolka participated in scripting,
direction and sexual assault. Although Bernardo twice left the house
for food, Homolka did not free French. On the fourth day, French
(declaring her support for Homolka and defying Bernardo to the end,
receiving a last vicious beating for calling him a bastard) was
strangled. Homolka cut off the hair, stripped, washed and douched the
body and helped Bernardo deposit it in a country ditch. She scrubbed
the house and car, vacuumed carpets and burned hair, clothes and the
vacuum bag. Galligan dwells on these domestic details.

The FBI was called in to profile the murderers. This time the oracle
was wrong, concluding that the killers were male blue-collar workers.
Bernardo's abuse of Homolka again escalated. She was strangled, knives
were thrown at her, she was hit with firewood, shoes and a flashlight,
kicked, punched and raped, her hair was pulled out, she was pushed
downstairs, her foot was punctured on a rusty nail. Galligan
cautiously observes, "If her evidence is truthful, there can be no
doubt that Paul Bernardo's treatment of her through the last half of
1992 is nothing short of a horror story. It is somewhat of a surprise
that she is still alive and sane" (p. 41). On 5 January 1993, co-
workers concerned about her absence from work called her parents, who
took her to hospital. Galligan quotes from the report of the ER
physician. Homolka had black-ringed "raccoon" eyes and a hemorrhage in
the left eye from blows to the back of the head driving the brain
forward into the skull, a contusion to the forehead, bruises down the
side of her neck and along her arms, bruises and swelling to 75% of
her legs from mid-thigh down, and a puncture wound from a screwdriver
on her right thigh above the knee. She could not walk. She had been
handcuffed, bound with the electrical cord used to strangle Mahaffy
and French and left in the root cellar where the bodies had been
stored. "Dr. Arndt reports at p. 7 that the emergency room physician
at the hospital said, 'this was the worst case of wife assault that he
had seen' " (p. 41). Bernardo was charged with assault and released on
bail. On 9 January Homolka moved in with her aunt and uncle, consulted
a legal aid lawyer and began divorce proceedings.

On 1 February 1993, Forensics informed Metro Toronto police of a
preliminary DNA match between Bernardo's samples and samples from
three rape victims. Bernardo was placed under surveillance. Toronto
and St Catherine's police met together for the first time and Bernardo
at last became a suspect in the Scarborough rapes and the St
Catharine's murders. Police interviewed Homolka. She told them of her
abuse by Bernardo. When they left, she told her relatives about the
murders and retained a criminal lawyer. Bernardo was arrested 17
February 1993 on 23 rape charges. Murder charges were laid against him
three months later.

"I hold no brief for Karla Homolka"-image, credibility and the plea
bargain

The discretion not to charge must not be lightly used, Galligan
writes, and public confidence is a serious factor in plea bargaining.
The murder case against Homolka was strong, based on her own
statements to family and co-workers. The case against Bernardo was
weak to non-existent. Interjurisdictionalcommittees of police forces
and Crown attorneys were established to investigate, share evidence
and decide on strategy. When Homolka's lawyer approached the Crown
with an offer to bargain, it was clear that she was central to all
strategies. The bargain, finalised 14 May 1993, required Homolka to
give an induced statement testing her evidence and credibility,
followed by a cautioned statement waiving her right against self-
crimination to ensure that she came through. She would withhold
nothing, assist police in their investigations, never enter a book or
media contract for profit from her crimes and testify against
Bernardo. There would be a publicity ban until Bernardo's trial.
Charges would not be laid in Tammy's murder. In return, the Crown
would recommend a sentence of 12 years concurrent on two counts of
manslaughter. The sentencing judge agreed, writing, 'This accused has
committed the worst crimes, however she is not the worst offender-for
whom the maximum sentence [life imprisonment] is designed' (p. 107).
Homolka had "something to sell", Galligan writes, and the Crown had
"something to buy" but she "could not hold out for too high a
price" (p. 63). Nor, it should be noted, could the Crown. The Mahaffy
and

French families "reluctantly acceded" to the bargain as "the lesser of
two evils" (p. 111).

In accordance with the bargain, Homolka's part in all three murders
was disclosed to the court. The Crown acknowledged that the evidence
would found murder charges. Homolka's counsel made delicate reference
to her assistance in the Bernardo case. 'Importantly, it is recognized
by the Crown that she may help to ensure that those who may also be
responsible for these odious crimes are brought to justice' (p. 104).
Galligan details Homolka's contributions to the Bernardo murder
investigation. In 400 hours of interviews with police and prosecutors,
she made two disclosures leading to the first real evidence
implicating Bernardo. Police had checked retail outlets for cement
purchases for disposal of the Mahaffey remains without success.
Homolka told them that Bernardo had returned unused bags for refund
and was angry about having to leave his name. Records checked out.
This was the first link between Bernardo and the Mahaffy murder.
Police had exhaustively tested carpets for stains but Homolka pointed
out an area she had taken special pains to clean. The underside bore
traces of semen and vomit matching DNA from Bernardo and French. This
was the first link between Bernardo and the French murder.

Homolka did not mention Jane Doe. Memories surfaced in a post-sentence
dream. She recalled administering drugs, Doe's breath stopping,
calling 911, canceling the ambulance, sitting up with her all night,
Bernardo sodomising her, the videotaping. "Why didn't I remember all
of this when they first questioned me?" she wrote to her lawyer (p.
130). "I have to tell them but what if they nail me for this too? Can
you do something to make sure they don't?" She argues, "I never
believed that the videotapes were destroyed. I believed the police
were in possession of the videotapes when I was originally questioned.
I ... admitted my involvement in things that are far more
incriminating to myself than this". Why should she lie? The psy
sciences could and did explain her memory loss in terms of returned
memories, repressed memories, other sequelae of battering, drugs and
alcohol. If she did not in fact remember the Jane Doe assaults,
Galligan concludes, then a perjury charge would not succeed and the
bargain could not be voided by late disclosure. "I hold no brief for
Karla Homolka. Nevertheless ... she completely and fully disclosed her
complicity" (p. 58). The administration of justice faces disrepute if
the Crown reneges and, unless it can be proved that Homolka wilfully
withheld knowledge of the Doe assaults, the Crown is bound.

The central concern, however, was the impact on Homolka's credibility
if the bargain were withdrawn and if she were charged in the Jane Doe
assaults. On her credibility alone would rest Bernardo's conviction.
If charged with the Doe's assaults, Galligan argues, her defence would
rest first on abuse of process in the Crown's violation of the bargain
and second on necessity, duress, compulsion or "moral involuntariness"
resulting from Bernardo's abuse. Acquittal would be unlikely but the
trial would be long and complex and sentence would be token. In
support of his theory, Galligan cites Bernardo jurors, one saying that
the evidence of battering and duress was there "in huge, huge
quantities" and a second who wrote to her parents, "I personally
believe she was manipulated, controlled and battered" (p. 167).
(Another juror, quoted in press accounts, said he did not believe a
word of it.) Due to court congestion, Homolka's trial would not end
before Bernardo's trial, violating a Canadian practice rule that
charges against accomplices be dealt with before they can testify for
the Crown.

Murder charges were laid against Bernardo four days after Homolka's
sentencing. Preferred indictments were granted on all charges and
trial began 4 May 1994. Homolka was cross-examined intermittently in
prison by defencecounsel over a three-month period. Jury selection
began a year later, 1 May 1995. Then began a long series of motions,
most evidentiary. Bernardo's rap Iyrics-"I'm a solo creep I make the
girls weep acting out my crimes while others sleep", "I'm a deadly
innocent guy", "I've got no remorse and I've got no shame"'°-his "teen
model" catalogue cutouts" and the "Compliant victims" study'2 were
among exhibits ruled inadmissable on the basis of prejudicial impact.
On 12 September 1994, Bernardo's counsel Ken Murray approached the
bench to withdraw from the case. His new counsel John Rosen took the
videotapes, reviewed them and gave them to police 22 September
(Campbell, 1996, p. 213). Rosen told the court, "I determined that it
was my duty as an Officer of the Court and as a matter of law to turn
all six videotapes over to the police". The videotapes spectacularly
reveal Homolka's role in the assaults. They do not show the killings.
That Bernardo's conviction for murder would rest solely on her
credibility proved correct. His lawyers investigated the possibility
of privately prosecuting Homolka for murder, in order to destroy
credibility. Homolka began testifying 19 June 1995 and spent over
three weeks on the stand. The defence conceded that Bernardo
participated in the abduction and assault of Mahaffy and French but
argued that he did not kill them, hypothesising that Homolka killed
French while Bernardo was out of the house and Mahaffy strangled
herself on the wire around her neck secured to Homolka's hope chest.
To emphasise the point that Homolka's lack of credibility was
Bernardo's sole defence, Galligan quotes from closing argument.

She is the only one who points the finger at him and says that they
died by ligature strangulation at his hands, not hers.... that's what
it comes down to. Do you believe her? ... It is a major lie. It is
something that goes to the heart of her credibility. It is something
that reveals her for what she really is. A person who would lie,
cheat, steal and manipulate the evidence in an effort to protect
herself.... Would you condemn a dog in a dogcatcher's court who is
alleged to have bitten someone on evidence like that? ... Is her
evidence believable and credible? Does it satisfy the intellect,
soothe the conscience? (p. 119)

Bernardo's conviction is for Gallagher the ultimate justification of
the plea bargain. "[D]istasteful as it always is to negotiate with an
accomplice, the Crown had no alternative" (p. 111).'3

Having preserved what it could of the credibility of its sole living
eyewitness, the Crown had to make another tactical choice. Accomplices
testifying for the Crown may be presented with the disdain accorded to
participants in horrible crimes, or with sympathy. The Crown chose the
latter. A battered and controlled Homolka would shore up credibility.
This persona, although a justice necessity, also seemed less mask than
reality. It was not contemplated that the videotapes, widely believed
to have been destroyed, might reappear. Nor was it contemplated that
these would make the nature and degree of her complicity spectacularly
apparent at the moment of truth for Homolka and the justice system-the
trial of Paul Bernardo. Homolka's assignment of a junior role in the
killings had been widely derided outside Canada, fed by the media ban.
Although the tapes were seen only by judge and jury (and by Bernardo,
who kept asking that choice bits be replayed), they were heard by the
entire courtroom.'4 Seeing may be believing but hearing is more
engaging, as media theorist Marshall McLuhan and violence theorist
Lonnie Athens (1989) observe, and it was here that the image of
Homolka-as-prey fully shifted to Homolka-aspredator in the public
mind. In defending her medico-legal persona against public opprobrium,
Galligan gives center place to the psy disciplines.

"Indeed, she was a victan herself"-psychiatry and guilt

Galligan sets out the reconstruction process. Homolka had been seen by
ER physicians in St. Catherine's on her admission to hospital and her
lawyer had insisted on a psychiatric evaluation before going forward
with the plea bargain. She was admitted to a Toronto hospital on 5
March 1993. Her stay of over six weeks for evaluation and treatment
was much longer than expected. She was placed under the care of a
consulting psychiatrist in prison and was evaluated by two
psychiatrists and two psychologists chosen by the Crown. Psy reports
stress anxiety and depression, learned helplessness, post-traumatic
stress disorder, "pyschic numbing" (p. 152), lack of affect and other
sequelae of psychological torture and abuse-in short, battered women's
syndrome. All agreed that Homolka showed no evidence of masochistic
tendencies, psychosis or sexual "deviance". Her abuse was chronicled
by category-physical, sexual, 'psychological including evidence of
domination" (p. 155)-in relation to the murders, assaults and
Bernardo's extramural rapes. One psy evaluator writes that she was
"hoodwinked and intimidated [and] believed that she was trapped in the
same manner that an abused wife considers herself to be trapped and
then having to fend for her life" (p. 80). Another explains that she
is a "concentration camp survivor".

Indeed Karla's experience since her age 17, could be to some degree,
compared to the experiences of concentration camp survivors who as
well experienced horrendous tragedies and had to go through and
perform actions in order to survive that under normal circumstances
they would clearly have stayed away from, but in the interest of self-
preservation or in the interest of preserving other people's lives,
did see themselves [as1 helpless and went through the actions as had
been required of them. (p. 77)

"Indeed," one writes, "she was a victim herself" (p. 81).

It is "simplistic" to expect a battered woman to easily leave or
refuse the demands of a spouse, Galligan observes (p. 105). Citing R.
v. Lavallee (1990), 76 CR (3d)329, in which the Supreme Court of
Canada recognized battered women's syndrome in the law of self-
defence, he notes that the case casts light on her conduct but cannot
excuse it. Psy findings meet lay definitions of compulsion but cannot
support a legal defence of mental disorder, duress or necessity in
Homolka's circumstances. Immunity from prosecution could not be
granted. Psy evaluators helpfully agreed. Homolka was "technically of
sound mind and free of disease of the mind of sufficient severity to
cloud her awareness or cause her to be unable to appreciate the nature
and quality of her acts" (p. 81), one report concludes in a deliberate
echo of the criminal law definition of mental disorder. The report of
psychologist Peter Jaffe, a Canadian authority on spousal violence, is
quoted extensively. Jaffe spent ten hours interviewing Homolka,
reviewed other psy evaluations and consulted Lenore Walker, author of
The Battered Woman Syndrome, the book on Homolka's shelf Homolka

reports a clear and consistent history of emotional, physical, and
sexual violence that trapped her in an abusive relationship. In our
opinion, she fits all the criteria for the battered woman's syndrome.
In our views, she was groomed, by Mr. Bernardo, to become involved in
increasingly bizarre and dangerous behaviour ... Mr. Bernardo involved
her in three deaths that gradually increased her role and
participation. According to Ms. Homolka, Mr. Bernardo's next
instruction was for her to kidnap and kill someone by herself. (p.
156)

Pivotal to legal and psy evaluations of Karla Homolka is the study
"Compliant victims of the sexual sadist" (Hazelwood et al., 1993).
Where Galligan falters, unable to account for the gap between the
degree of Homolka's abuse and her abuse of others-the gap between
moral compulsion and moral agency-the study is the missing link. The
study also closed gaps for psy evaluators. While conceding her abuse
and duress, a psychiatrist retained by the Crown writes, "Karla
Homolka remains something of a diagnostic mystery. Despite her ability
to present herself very well, there is a moral vacuity in her which is
difficult if not impossible to explain".'5 After reading the study, he
found "a number of parallels with this case" which were "so striking
as to be worthy of particular attention" (p. 155). Yet his conclusion,
if any, is not recorded.

The study documents technologies of compliance used to control
domestic partners by sexual sadists, defined as men sexually aroused
by pain and degradation. Sexual sadists believe that women are by
nature morally corrupt and corrupting, and "prove" this corruption by
degrading and sexually torturing them. Their partners, having
demonstrated their corruption by engaging in sexual perversity,
"deserve" further punishment. This induced compliance confirms
sadists' beliefs about women. Researchers interviewed seven partners
of sexual sadists identified in the FBI database. All were sexually
naive "nice" middle or upper-middle class women, professionally
successful and of higher socioeconomic status than their partners.
They were "non-aggressive" and "guilt-ridden" about the relationships,
which lasted from three months to 13 years (Hazelwood eal., 1993, p.
475). As children, four women had been sexually abused, two physically
abused and six psychologically abused. Compliance was induced in
stages, beginning with romance and seduction and progressing to
degradation and brutalization. sexual activities were introduced with
psychological reinforcement, positive for compliance (compliments and
attention) and negative for refusal (pouts and rejection). Regimes of
increasingly brutal sex, social isolation and violence followed. Anal
sex was the preference of all sadists in the study. Forced object
penetration (usually anal, with such objects as a 12-cell flashlight),
"scripting" women to say things pleasurable to their partners and
recording in photographs, audiotapes and drawings were characteristic.
All women reported painful prolonged bondage, all were beaten, all
were bitten, six were strangled, five were whipped, four were hung,
four were burned, three were forced into sex with others and four were
forced into criminal acts, one

pleading guilty as co-conspirator in the abduction and murder of
victims acquired for her husband, for which she served five years.
Tangled matrices of childhood experiences, low self-valuation and
recent experiences of rejection, it seems, made these women vulnerable
to manipulation. Sadists

become expert at finding vulnerable women. At the centre of such
relationships is not pain but control. The study quotes a sexual
sadist.

Sadism: The wish to inflict pain is not the essence of sadism. One
essential impulse: to have complete mastery over another person, to
make him-her a helpless object of our will, to become her God, to do
with her as one pleases. To humiliate her, to enslave her are means to
his end, and the most important radical aid is to make her suffer
since there is no greater power over another person than that of
inflicting pain on her to force her to undergo suffering without her
being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the complete domination
over another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.

(Hazelwood et al., 1993, p. 478; emphasis in original)

The shift in pronoun is telling, but the researchers do not comment.
Another is quoted on his first murder. "I never thought it would be so
easy to kill a person, or that I would enjoy it. But it was easy and I
was enjoying the feeling of supremacy. A supremacy like I have never
known before."

Psy evaluations are determinative in Galligan's conclusion that
Homolka's amnesia respecting Jane Doe resulted from battering and
psychological shock or, at least, that this could not be disproved.
Evaluators agree on Homolka's symptomatology as a battered woman under
duress sufficient to reduce her culpability, but not to exonerate her.
She is neither dangerous nor sexually deviant, without Bernardo's
influence she would not have offended and she will not re-offend, psy
reports assure. Bernardo is not just an ordinary batterer. He is a
sexual sadist doing to nice young middle-class women what other sexual
sadists have done before. This is the clincher for Galligan and it
almost convinces her most sceptical evaluator, although he continued
to wonder at her moral vacuity. Homolka is not the ordinary victim of
spousal assault and cannot be expected to act like one, because her
batterer is not ordinary.

Demonisation and penance

Qualitative case studies are important in evaluating the construction
of female deviance and the disciplinary interface of law and
psychiatry. Gender distinctions may be lost in large-scale
quantitative studies where everyone who seems weird is sent for
testing (cf. Menzies et al., 1992). When sex murderers are women and
their victims are female children, values surrounding womanhood are
doubly challenged. Consort with devils may be Hollywood entertainment
or a preoccupation of the unreconstructed religious Right but
centuries of such beliefs leave the residual metaphor of witch or
vampire, the deadly seductive lamiaand succubi fictioned from the dark
side of male sexuality. Beginning with Eve in Western tradition, women
are imaged as corrupt and corrupting. The 1486 judicial text Malleus
Maleficarum or "Witches' Hammer" was on the desk of every European
magistrate for almost 300 years, in the fight against the great
conspiracy of witchcraft against the Christian state. "All wickedness
is but little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John
Chrysostom says on the text, It is not good to marry (Matthew 19: 10):
'What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable
punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable
calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of
nature, painted with fair colours!'-" (Kramer & Sprenger, 1971, p.
43). Reference is made to witches sacrificing infants to the devil and
promising children to the devil for lustful uses. The Malleus reserves
the extreme penalty of burning at the stake to advocating
contraception and performing abortions (which deny paternity) and
robbing men of virility (which denies the possibility of paternity).
If men achieve the neutered state through prayer it is, however, a
virtue. Consideration is given to whether the devil through incubi or
succubi can engender children but the authors decide that only God can
give life through women. "To conclude. All witchcraft comes from
carnal lust, which is in women insatiable" (Kramer & Sprenger, 1971,
p. 47).

Freud's reading of the Malleus confirmed his view that
psychoanalytical theories of split consciousness recall medieval
theories of demonic possession. Disclosure by judicially tortured
women in witch hunts, he writes, parallels disclosures of the hysteric
under psychoanalysis (Caudill, 1994, p. 46). Medieval witch hunts are
a metaphor of late twentieth-century investigations of child sexual
abuse. Freud's hysterics are victims of child sexual abuse. In Freud's
initial analysis of his female hysterics, he concluded that they had
been "seduced" by fathers or brothers in childhood (Wolff, 1988). He
withdrew his Seduction Theory under threat of professional expulsion
and instead submitted a paper which would dominate therapeutic and
legal response to child sexual abuse until the 1970s. His new theory
proposed a female Oedipal complex. In love with their fathers and
desiring the death of their mothers, hysterics fantasise childhood sex
with fathers. These complex turnings of victimisation and offending
are now standard fare in "explaining" abuse and abusers and,
conversely, in attacking victim credibility.'6

Galligan, like Freud, leaves us with an irreconcilable duality.
Homolka is an "equal epartner" in "the grossest of evil" (p. 221). She
may well have been, although

we see little of this equality in Galligan's account. Alternately, she
is just another battered partner of a sexual sadist, corrupted by his
gaze, caught with her victims in a rare tragedy. But that troubling
moral vacuity remains. Could Homolka not have lifted up her head for a
moment in her five years with Bernardo, worked out the logic, saved a
life besides her own? What so insulated her from these children's
suffering that she would enable their torture and murder rather than
risk her body or her marriage? Barely out of adolescence, she procured
her sister for her boyfriend as a Christmas present, killed her by
mistake and complained that her parents' mourning interfered with her
Princess Di wedding. She procured more victims for Bernardo, twice
repeated the deadly Tammy scenario with Jane Doe, videotaped and
starred in all events, scrubbed up afterwards and give a father's day
dinner while one child's body lay in the cellar of their Barbie-pink
house. The victims were children, three are dead and Homolka could
have saved them. Without devils, vampires and witches, without the
confident assurance of the psy sciences that she was trapped in
madness as surely as if she herself were legally insane, what is left?
Perhaps we are just surprised at the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt's
(1964) phrase which captures Homolka's ordinariness with that of
Hitler's minions who fitted themselves to the ends of a charismatic
leader. This did not absolve them of agency, as the Nuremberg Trials
showed. A psy description of Homolka (above) as a "concentration camp"
survivor brings home the terrible domesticity of the death camp and
its trustees. More than any other metaphor of vampire or devil, or psy
label of battered woman or compliant victim, it conveys the duality of
this privileged child caught in iniquity and the inadequacy of
metaphor when the camp walls are psychological.

The modicum of Homolka's guilt was calculated at the intersections of
law, public opinion and the psy disciplines. That she would be
demonised was clear to the prosecution and it took care to shape her
to the Procrustean bed of the battered woman. Even so, the parts that
could not be lopped off to fit resulted in 12 years in the Kingston
Penitentiary for Women. Is she penitent? Does she accept her guilt?
What is guilt, where discourses collide? Law is public, coercive.
Law's past is

· objective, a matter of provable fact, not feeling. Guilt is about
restoring the public

equilibrium through conviction and the retributive satisfaction of
punishment.

The clinic is a private and invitational world in which the past is a
matter of the

patient's subjectivity, where guilt is exorcised by restoring internal
equilibrium and

sel£esteem, by "getting better".

The discord is evident in a series of leaked prison letters published
in the Toronto Sun (Cairns & Burnside, 1994) in which Homolka comments
on her law and pay moments. The only death overtly mourned is that of
her relationship with Bernardo.

I started seeing one of the psychologists in addition to the
psychiatrist last

week. I felt like I was on the verge of another breakdown. Why
exactly, I

don't know. It could have something to do with the fact that an inmate
got

stabbed a while ago ... I'm going through some really difficult times
dealing

with the death of our relationship. That's how I'm trying to treat it-
like

a death-because I think it'll be easier to deal with that way. I am
really having a hard time with this. I almost would rather have had
him die, because then I'd at least be able to grieve properly. And
visit his grave and say goodbye. (5 October 1993)

She moves on to therapy and to the future. "Paul" is an agent not of
depravity and sorrow but of "insecurity". A new person is emergent,
love is in the future and therapists are in the way.

I am looking so forward to getting out of here and rebuilding my life.
I can't wait to see what the future holds for me-a new job, a new
husband (... a loving one this time!) children.... Paul made me into a
very insecure person. Hopefully that will all change in time. I am
trying to really change myself back into a newer, better version of
the person I was before I met Paul. I have a new therapist. She and I
get along really well and she is really helping me. I absolutely HATE
the psychiatrist here now. I only see him every other week now. He
told me the last time I saw him that I would never heal until I told
him all the details of what happened. Asshole. He is so mean and
cruel. So now I don't really tell him anything. (28 October 1 993).

Going to court interferes with her rebuilding. Paul is still mourned.

I'm really nervous about the future. When I'm finally released, that
is. I know I really should be concentrating on things in the nearer
future like court. But I just can't bear to think about such a painful
thing anymore. You know it's really not fair. My trial is over and
done with, but none of the pain is. Well, the pain will never be gone,
but talking about it will just make it raw ... Our life wasn't
supposed to end up this way. (24 November 1993)

Regrets about the past yield to hopes for the future, in a therapeutic
transition from counseled to counselor.

I am constantly thinking about what my life is going to be like when I
leave here. I am going to live so differently. Life with Paul ... as
well as being in prison really opens your eyes to how life should be
lived. I am going to do the things I always loved to do but never got
to do. I'm going to start horseback riding again. I'm going to take
lessons and even learn to jump! I also want to do volunteer work-I
would love to work on the Kids Help Phone and I've decided what I want
to do-work with abused women. I want to work to help prevent women
from being abused and also to work with women who have already been
abused. I want to go out on picnics with my friends and sister. Life
is going to be so great when I'm out of here. I will never take
anything for granted again in my life! (21 December 1 993).

Life with Paul, life without Paul, life in prison, only one sister
left with whom to pinic, her life as preparation for counseling
children and battered women, for having children? Homolka will receive
a sociology degree from the University of Toronto at about the same
time as her parole eligibility, after four years of incarceration. At
the time of writing, she has declined to apply for early release. She
must be released in 2001. Her family is supportive, her dog has
visited her in gaol, her cell is apart from others and decorated to
taste, small details which continue to provoke public resentment. She
was moved to an "open cottage" federal facility in Joliette, Quebec in
the summer of 1997 where, according to press reports, she is popular
with other prisoners.

'The truthful rendering into speech of who one is, to one's parents,
one's teachers, one's doctor, one's lover, and oneself, is installed
at the heart of contem porary procedures of individualization' (Rose,
1989: 240, citing Foucault, 1979). Confession for Homolka consisted of
400 hours with police and lawyers, 17 days on the witness stand,
countless therapeutic hours-the truthful rendering into discourse of
who she is. Does she know? Do we? The videotapes suggest something
less or more than truth but the camera often lies. Her prison letters
suggest something different, raising again that troubling moral
vacuity, that fractured persona. Should she be left to her privacy, a
curtain drawn over recovery, or is there something still to be learned
from this 'very black case' (p. 220)?

"A sinister side to them"-psychiatry and secrets

Psychoanalysis reveals the irrationality of the body and its desires
behind the mask of the intending subject of law, putting the lie to
law's constructs of reasonableness. Love and desire, at the extremes
represented by Homolka, are not reasonable. Without nuanced
explanation of desire and its lack, law is left with simple
dichotomies
-innocence and guilt, good and evil, competence and mental disorder.
There is a little room for shading even in such complex and endlessly
refined medico-legal constructs as battered women's syndrome (cf.
Shaffer, 1997). To fit law's Procrustean bed, too little love is
racked to fit and excesses of desire are lopped off. Law is the robber
of parts and the brutal restorer of lacks. Homolka could not be made
to fit the battered woman bed, however her persona was stretched or
shortened in medico-legal discourse. Her partial defence of duress,
her partial agency, her partial prison term and the fragmenting of her
meaning in law, in her self and in the public gaze are an invitation
to see her meaning as constructed with and against that of Paul
Bernardo and, ultimately, in terms of Western images of womanhood.

Bernardo employed all the control strategies described in the
"Compliant victims" study, perfected over time. He learned from his
mistakes with J.M.G. and I.F., earlier girlfriends. He explored the
outer envelope of his attractive powers and his sexual preferences
with the victims of his rapes. He found or made a devoted pupil in
Homolka. He took legal advantage of the institution of marriage, with
its privacy and conferral of spousal immunity, bearing traces of
coverture. Homolka could not be compelled to testify against him.
Bernardo was canny enough to save his confession of being the
Scarborough rapist until his wedding night, and to involve her
directly in procurement and murder. Coverture shuts doors. Battering,
with its control of will, act, meaning and identity, shuts more
(McGillivray, 1987; McGillivray & Comaskey, 1999). All shade into
sadism, which is little more than the extremes to which control is
taken. Psychopathic sexual sadists, one supposes, have no limits.

The "Compliant victims" study fails to account for a central finding.
Respondents " 'fell' for the men relatively quickly, even though they
recogniseda sinister side to them" (Hazelwood et al., 1993, p.477).
Why? Is "low self-esteem" sufficient explanation for Homolka's
pupilage? Was she seduced into submission, a slave without will or
agency under Bernardo's Svengali magnetism? Was she attracted to his
"sinister side" and an active, willing partner in some folie a deux?
Was she the dominant partner, as Bernardo alleges, who led him into
murder?

Patricia Pearson (1995,1997) offers a vigorous counter-argument to the
battered woman compliant victim theory. She supports this with
evidence of Homolka's robust participation, even leadership, in
videotaped acts and dialogue, her maintenance of the sham of her
marriage, her lack of visible injury until the end of the relationship
(co-workers' evidence to the contrary is not cited by Pearson) and
numerous slippages and inadequacies in explanatory aspects of her
testimony. Homolka is a fiercely competitive narcissist, jealous of
her virtually identical sisters and Bernardo's wandering eye. She made
herself the centre of his attention by her direction and willing
participation in the fulfilment of his desires. "The documentation of
bruises [tracking Homolka's abuse with the rapes and murders] was a
fool's arithmetic" (Pearson, 1995). The last beating was the only
serious one, an announcement by Bernardo that the relationship was
over. The blame, Pearson argues, lies with reductivist legal and
academic feminist discourses which prefer to believe that women who
kill are victims of the Svengali influence of men. Such discourses
refuse to confront female aggression. Women can be evil, too.'7

This is not news, even to feminist legal academics. But too much
agency is problematic. Demonising offenders like Homolka creates a
hyper-agency resulting in excessive prosecution of women-witchcraft,
infanticide and concealment of birth, prostitution, abortion,
contraception, the dismissal or demonisation of rape and child sexual
assault complainants. Demonising women ignores the impact of intimate
violence in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. It ignores women's
social conditioning and the disordered lives of female offenders
(Allen, 1987). Are women legally vested with too little agency? Basing
her study on English cases of crimes against the person, Hilary Allen
(1987) concludes that female offenders are disproportionately
psychiatrised. Going beyond notions of judicial leniency and systemic
bias, she asserts that, in the proper working of law and medicine, it
is not a matter of preferring a psy disposition for women over a legal
one but rather that women more often are seen to meet the theoretical
and practical criteria! for a medical disposition than are men. The
discrepancy is produced by the interaction of the medico-legal
structure-diminished responsibility in homicide and infanticide, for
example-with structured and gendered ideas about human nature.
Medicolegal discourses do not lie in words extraneous to what happens
to women. These discourses are "ways of understanding, deciding and
doing things; they are themselves the machinery of power in which both
professionals and their subjects are equally enmeshed" (Allen, 1987,
p. 111). The remoteness of legal and psychiatric discourses to the lay
mind and everyday reason is amplified when these discourses interact
and results may seem bizarre and shocking. Theorising about how men
and women are treated, Allen asserts, may lead to a more balanced view
of offending, bringing together understandings of women's painful and
disordered lives with notions of evil and agency in men. However
distorted one's inner life may be, she concludes, legal responsibility
for lives lived in the material world should not be erased by
psychiatry. Her argument recalls, as does Homolka's case, older
debates about the relationship of law and pyschiatry.

Psychiatry forged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the
specular and spectacular context of the asylum was entwined with legal
ideas about criminal responsibility and the development of the
criminal subspecialties of criminality and penology (Szasz, 1963;
Pick, 1989; Cameron & Frazer, 1987). Psychoanalysis, the Freudian
revolution, extended the clinical field of the abnormal into the
normal and the unspectacular (Szasz, 1963; Stone, 1984; Rose, 1989).
Although psychoanalysis implicates the abnormal in assessing the
normal, Freud did not believe that psy insights should deny or even
mitigate criminal responsibility, nor did he believe that such
insights explain criminal behaviour. In his 1931 'Expert Opinion on
the Halsmaan Case' in which a university student was charged with the
murder of his father, Freud writes that "mention of the Oedipus
complex has a misleading effect; it is at the least idle.... Precisely
because it is always present, the Oedipus complex is not suited to
provide a decision on the question of guilt" (qtd., Szasz 1963, p.
105).

Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz goes further. Law needs psychiatry to shore
up its normative mission. "By declaring the criminal mentally ill, the
society declares it unthinkable for any sane individual to be
alienated from the wider community of Americans and uncommitted to its
Puritan values" (Szasz 1963, p. 107). Psy findings deny moral choice.
The morality of medicine is substituted for that of law and the
coercion of the penal system is traded for that of the asylum. Psy
findings relieve judges of the ultimate burden of apportioning guilt
and judges rely on the psy disciplines to assuage their own guilt.
Freud and Szasz assume that psychiatric discourse has the potential to
subvert criminal justice by negating legal fault with notions of the
unconscious. What was not contemplated by either law or psychiatry is
the commonplace role now held by the psy disciplines in criminal
discourse and disposition. If anything has been subverted, it is
psychiatry by law, in its routine use of psy discourses to justify
decisions at a micro level. As Freud asserts, to explain everything in
psy terms of "complexes" and the unconscious is to explain nothing.
Even so, women offenders continue to "present" as mysterious to the
law, as weird cases explicable only by the psy disciplines.

Is the system biased toward the psychiatrising of women or is such
data as Allen's distorted by its reliance on rare and often
sensationalized crimes against the person committed by women? A
Canadian study of Metropolitan Toronto Forensic Services (METFORS),
which offers pretrial clinical evaluation of accused persons and
processes 600 to 800 people each year, sought to demonstrate the
relevance of gender to medico-legal outcome (Menzies et al., 1992).
The study found no statistical differences in psyattribution-mental
disorder, treatment history, dangerousness, criminality-that could be
explained by gender. Rather, there was "an unexpected uniformity in
the quality and scope of forensic encounters that appeared to
transcend gender categories" (Menzies et al., 1992, p. 189). The
different outcomes of Allen's study and the METFORS study may be
explained by a shift in focus from crimes against the person in
Allen's study to all crimes in the METFORS study, by the mass case
processing of the Toronto clinic and by differences between UK and
Canadian treatment of diminished responsibility in criminal law.

Culpable homicide is excused in circumstances of self-defence and
mental disorder but not in circumstances of duress or necessity. In
Canada, such circumstances can only mitigate sentence. Murder offers
little sentencing discretion, pushing plea bargaining for
manslaughter. English law recognises a defence of diminished
responsibility, a subcategory of mental disorder reducing murder to
manslaughter. Under English law, Homolka might well have taken her
chances. At the centre of the debate, always, is agency and the
capacity for choice. Freud and his followers demonstrate the fragility
of this concept, yet stoutly defend its application in criminal law.
Feminist analysis and family violence studies show how agency is
subverted for women caught in violent intimate relationships. When a
young Winnipeg woman, Lyn Lavallee, shot her abusive lover in the back
of the head-he put the gun in her hand and said do it or she would be
dead in the morning; she aimed out but missed-the Supreme Court of
Canada cited psy findings and feminist theorists and found reasonable
self-defence in the circumstances of battered women. The case
acknowledged the need for psy evidence to explain the gap between
social mythologies of wife-battering and the subjectivity of battered
women (R. v. Lavallee (1990), 76 CR (3d) 329).

The defence of "battered women's syndrome" cuts two ways (Martinson et
al., 1991). Moral will is eroded by intimate violence. This erosion
lowers or erases agency and criminal responsibility. Alternatively, it
syndromises women, reducing the social roots of battering and women's
inequality to an individualized medical condition and thus relieving
society of the burden of addressing those roots. Battered women's
syndrome is a wedding of feminism, psychiatry and law, a new addition
to the taxonomy of culpability in the old alliance of law and the psy
disciplines. It is rarely a complete defence (Sheehy, 1994). Usually,
as in Homolka's case, it figures in charge and sentence reduction. Had
Homolka killed Bernardo, it is likely that she would have been
exonerated. She killed others and this falls outside the parameters of
all legal defences. Bernardo and Homolka were assigned medical
identities-battered woman and sadistic psychopath-leading to different
legal results. Battered women's syndrome diminishes legal fault.
Psychopathy, the inability to feel another's pain, does not. It does
not meet the definition of mental disorder in §16 of the Canadian
Criminal Code (see R. v. Kjeldson [1981] 2 SCR 617), nor does it
elicit the moderated compassion ("we all might have been there") which
reduces sentence. If anything, the effect of a diagnosis of
psychopathy is to heighten guilt. Psychopathy is untreatable,
psychopaths shows no real remorse and are likely to reoffend and long-
term incapacitation through incarceration seems inevitably
appropriate.

Psychopathy is a widely cited explanation for sadistic sexual violence
and especially for sex murderers. Yet explanations of sexual violence
in lay mythology, criminology and medicine are contradictory and
incoherent, as Cameron and Frazer (1987) argue. In their view,
psychopathy is a convenient dustbin to which men who do unpleasant
things are consigned. It has no meaning, its definition is
tautological and it impedes feminist Reconstruction theories of male
sexual violence. The aim of feminist Reconstruction, Cameron and
Frazer assert, is to provide an alternate account of sexual violence
which will enhance feminist politics and reconstruct desire. Sex
murder will no longer be a metaphor for freedom and for the ultimate
possession of the object of desire. What it will be, the authors do
not say, but they are right to focus on psychopathy as a problematic
medico-legal designation. Psychopathy has historically been overused,
under-researched and incoherently defined. There is now some support
for a theory of psychopathy based on brain function and childhood
experiences of violence. Such a theory, when fully developed, might
combine the work of Canadian researcher Robert Hare, based on CT
scanning of prisoners identified as psychopathic and demonstrating
significant differences in brain function, with the outcome of
multiple experiences of violence in childhood (Miller, 1983; Athens,
1989).

We know little of Bernardo's childhood or his psychoanalysis.
According to press accounts, he lived in his parents' working- or
middle-class Scarborough, Toronto neighbourhood until age 26, in a
room papered with upward-mobility positive-thinking mottos, a copy of
Miss Manners on his beside table. There is mention of a mother who
chased and terrified neighbourhood children, of perpetually curtained
windows and much shouting, of an ordinary sister and brother and the
parental nicknaming of Bernardo as "worthless bastard". He was in fact
conceived in an extramarital affair. There is a quote from his father
(Blackwell, 1995). "What family isn't dysfunctional? Everybody wants
to be a victim, everybody wants a scapegoat. How about looking in the
mirror and blaming yourself? ... Tumultuous? So what? There weren't
beatings. You have three kids, you yell a lot." Psychologist Peter
Jaffe's report on Bernardo for the Crown describes his parenting as
harsh and inadequate. Bernardo legally changed his patronym to Teale
in 1993, the year his father went to prison for sexual assaults
committed two decades earlier.

Other than these few facts culled from news stories, we know little of
Bernardo and his medical labeling. We have access to the results of
Homolka's analysis through the Galligan Report. We know more about her
than we do about Myra Hindlay, her English counterpart, also convicted
of the sex-related homicide of children in concert with her
"psychopathic" boyfriend Ian Brady (Cameron & Fraser, 1987). Hindlay
is the only major counter-example offered by Cameron and Frazer to the
presumption that sex murderers are men. Like Homolka, Hindlay is
explained as either corrupted by her partner-the Svengali or Pygmalion
effect-or as monstrously evil. No "battering" or "compliant victim"
theory was offered for Hindlay, as none existed in 1966. With Hindlay,
Homolka is accused of being the dominant partner. With Hindlay,
Homolka stands with her victims in her partner's sexual gaze, and is
so recorded in photographic mementos.'9

In Homolka's case, legal discourse is determinative but psy discourse
is of the essence. There are signs of struggle. Jaffe's psy evaluation
of Homolka, for example, pushes for a finding of no legal agency.
Other pay evaluators, more compliant with law's assertion of place,
resist battering as a complete explanation. The case confirms the
symbiotic relationship between law and psychiatry. Law and
psychoanalysis, Freud (1906, p. 108) writes, have in common a concern
"with a secret, with something hidden.... In the case of the criminal
it is a secret which he knows and hides from you, whereas in the case
of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself does not know either,
which is hidden even from himself." Homolka's secrets are hidden from
the justice system and must be discovered by the psy sciences. The
need for these secrets is the ultimate justification of the plea
bargain.

"A very black case"-exorcising demons

Homolka, Galligan concludes, should have stood with Bernardo in the
prisoner's dock facing charges of first degree murder. Had the
videotapes been found in time, there would have been no plea bargain.
Had Homolka disclosed the Jane Doe assaults prior to the bargain, her
total sentence under the plea bargain would be 14 or 15 years rather
than 12 years, on the principle of totality of sentence. The
difference did not justify voiding the bargain and risking Bernardo's
acquittal and "there could be no room for error in the successful
prosecution of Paul Bernardo" (p. 323). Further, "there is one
immutable principle which stands out. It is that the word of the Crown
is its bond. A case as horrible as this one, where public feelings run
high against a particular individual, sorely tests one's principles.
But if the principle is right, then it must prevail, even in this
case. Because if that principle is abandoned in this case, then who
can be sure that it will not be abandoned in another, and in another,
until the time arrives when the word of the Crown is mere dross" (p.
209). The Crown made a tactical decision in full knowledge after
weighty consideration of all known facts. "Distasteful as it is, the
practice which has existed for over three hundred years of giving
immunity or a 'discount' to an accomplice to obtain her evidence
against a co-perpetrator is sometimes a necessary one and is a legal
one" (p. 215). It was "a tactical decision which turned out to be
right".

The dark side resurfaces in Galligan's epilogue. Homolka haunts the
narrative but she herself disappears. It was a "very black case" (p.
220) for its gruesome evidence, its toll on victims and families and
the damage caused to the health (and careers) of police officers and
lawyers who investigated, prosecuted and defended it. There is a
"bright side" in the coping of the victims' families with "tragedy and
hurt of a degree which no human being should be asked to bear [proving
that] the good in human nature can surmount even the grossest of evil,
that evil which touched their lives" (p. 221). (Homolka's mother, at
first sharing with other mothers the tragedy of all these lost
daughters, was shunned when the videotapes were played at trial. She
is also absent from Galligan's account.)

Homolka's demons are perhaps being exorcised in her thousands of hours
of confession, a gift of the plea bargain. She remains caught in the
maelstrom of public demonisation. Sympathy for this devil is
constrained by her moral vacuity, by her desire for the Hollywood
order of things-cute boyfriend, great looks, fancy wedding, perfect
marriage, neat house-inverted, a wedding and three funerals, four if
we count the only death she seems to mourn, that of her relationship
with Bernardo."Our life wasn't supposed to end up this way", she
writes (above). The gap between law and the psy disciplines in the
face of the problem of evil in women is painfully apparent in
Galligan's struggle to comprehend and contain the findings of law's
junior discourse. The fracture between criminal justice and social
notions of justice is wider than ever.

The Ontario justice system has spent the years since Bernardo's arrest
exorcis ing its own demons. These are the system failures examined in
the Campbell Report(1996). The result is a massive overhaul of the
system, from policing and information-sharing to the processing of
forensic evidence. The Mahaffy and French families are pursuing their
own demons, taking their claim for the sealing of the videotapes to
the Supreme Court of Canada20 but the videotapes may be needed in
Bernardo's appeal. They also may be needed in the prosecution and
discipline of his

first lawyer, Ken Murray, a last demon of the justice system. Murray
removed the

videotapes from Bernardo's house on his client's instructions in May
1993. In the

summer of 1994, he sought the advice of the Professional Conduct
Committee of

the Law Society of Upper Canada. He was advised to turn the tapes over
to the

court and to withdraw from the case. He did so in September of that
year (above).

In January 1997, he was charged with obstructing justice, possessing
child pornogra

phy, conspiracy and making obscene material, in copying the tapes
(Hess & Grange,

1997). All but the charge of obstruction were later dropped.2' A
complaint of

professional misconduct was laid the following month, after two years
of investiga

tion by the Law Society of Upper Canada (Gorham, 1997). A paramount
duty of

the lawyer is the protection of confidential information. Real
evidence
-the knife,

the gun, the robbery proceeds-is not subject to solicitor-client
privilege. The trick

is how to turn the evidence over to the authorities without
compromising the client's

identity.22 As the videotapes proclaim Bernardo's identity, this
arguably was not

possible, but as the tapes do not show the killings, were they
evidence of murder?

Did Murray intend to obstruct justice or did he only intend to serve
his client? Or

does client service only furnish the motive for obstruction of
justice? These are the

narrow legal issues.

The broader ethical issue emerges from the widening fracture between
two views of moral lawyering. Does professional duty override the duty
to obey the law? If so, should the lawyer be prepared to lose his or
her licence in defending the client, even go to gaol? Should lawyering
be civil disobedience? If so, should we require lawyers to pay the
price? The adversarial model Murray followed is an extreme variation
on the "neutral technician of law" (McGillivray, 1999). The model
stresses the paramountcy of the lawyer's duty to the client to the
exclusion of all other interests and duties.23 It is strongly defended
in criminal defence work even by those who reject it in other legal
arenas. Rule 10(10) of the Ontario Professional Conduct code states
that 'the lawyer's duty is to protect the client as far as possible
from being convicted' (Law Society, of Upper Canada, 1997, p.36). The
lawyer must disregard "private opinion as to credibility or merits"
and can rely on "all available evidence or defences including so-
called technicalities not known to be false or fraudulent". Above all
is the duty of confidentiality, wider than solicitor-client privilege
at law. Although Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976, defence
ethics are increasingly driven by cross-border US cultural influences.
Canadian defence lawyers are absorbing a radical professional
consciousness developed in the shadow of hanging, lethal injection and
that useful invention by a US dentist, the electric chair.

The adversarial model of lawyering is set against the 'ethical model'
which seeks to balance duty to the client with duty to the court and
the law, to victims and their families, to the administration of
justice and public service, through and beyond the immediate needs of
the client.24 Variations on the model divide almost equally into calls
for a return to some golden age of lawyering, in which lawyers are
internally governed, and calls for stricter professional governance.
Alternatively, a new lawyering is promoted, in which the lawyer is
transformed by law by identifying through the client to a just cause.
Concern for professional image, recognition of the impossibility of
being at once neutral and ethical and a sense of a lost craft or art
or moral or civic high ground run through the debates. In concealing
the videotapes, did Murray break a lesser law in obeying a greater
ethical duty to his client, or was he centrally mistaken as to what
legal ethics require? Until this question is answered by the courts
and the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Homolka case cannot be put to
rest, safely staked out at the crossroads of law and legal
professionalism.

What do we learn from Homolka's case? Criminal justice is pressed to
the extreme, driven by the rarity of the female sex killer-what to do
with her, how to see her.,-and the need for evidence against Bernardo,
a far more serious threat to female children than his partner ever
was. In the prosecution and professional discipline of Ken Murray, an
ordinary court-appointed lawyer caught up in the bizarre, the limits
of client advocacy will be tested. Homolka's bargain demonstrates the
importance of the practical ethical standards set out by the Martin
Report (1993) in everyday plea bargaining. Galligan delineates the
bargaining process in cold prose standing in stark contrast to the
horror to which it refers but he demonstrates a practical, ethical
means for retaining important facts where plea bargaining has
"ditched" the charges. Disclosing to the sentencing judge all
aggravating factors even where there is no related charge is of
central importance under Canada's new sentencing guidelines.25 Even
so, the larger ethics of bargaining with a sex killer were so deeply
challenging that legal actors withdrew from the case due to profound
discomfort with Homolka's remaking and the dreadful facts which slowly
emerged from her evidence and from forensic findings.

Centrally, Homolka's case is a morality tale about good and evil and
the complexities introduced into this simple dichotomy by a
multiplicity of discourses, each claiming truth. The psy disciplines
are no longer engaged in hegemonic struggles over the field of
criminal culpability. They are now law's shy handmaids, invitees on
its premises, dismissible at will. As Josef K. is told in The Tnal,
"It accepts you when you come and it dismisses you when you go".26
With Galligan's dismissal of the psy disciplines go the complex
meanings of Karla Homolka.

Postscript

In the course of writing this article, I have been challenged to give
my opinion on the guilt of Karla Homolka. With every woman familiar
with the case-younger women usually refuse to discuss it, sickened-I
believe that I would at some point look up from my own condition,
however brutally constrained or blindly self-construed, to save a life
besides my own. I do not know if this is true. I hope it is. I have
not been there. I am grateful that my daughter did not meet Paul
Bernardo and I think every mother and daughter who did not also should
be grateful. I hold no brief for her, I do not understand her, I have
never seen her, but I do know, as a student of intimate violence, how
far and how deeply women are conditioned by social institutions to
distrust and dislike themselves and to turn to male authority and its
reflection in female adolescent goals to be defined as worthy. If the
definition of worthiness is thin-looks, lifestyle, social status,
getting a cute guy with charismatic power to marry you to the envy of
other women-it is less a problem peculiar to Homolka than a set of
standards peculiar to our age. How do Homolka's goals differ, in
essence, from those of Jane Austen's protagonists? Austen's characters
search for moral probity in marital partners but this seems a lightly
troubling matter, more concerned with the avoidance of cads. The
gentleman cad of the eighteenthcentury novelic tradition becomes the
vampire noble of the nineteenth century. Best known is Stoker's
Dracula (1897), with its interrogation of lawyering and its depiction
of the giddy young Lucy drawn easily into the seductions of the
vampire to become vampire, taking the blood of children, achingly
delivered of evil in her staking (McGillivray, 1999). Why don't we
blame Bernardo, cad and vampiric seducer? Why do we blame Homolka for
being seduced, when seduction is so necessary to our own romance?

Bernardo did not spring full-grown into evil from the frontal lobes of
an avenging god with a bad headache, an apotheosis of Athenic wisdom
in some post-edenic birth into evil. We do not know where he came
from. We do not know whether his diagnosis of psychopathy is "real" or
just a medico-legal label on the dustbin into which we toss cases of
inexplicable motivation. We have some evidence that there are brain
response patterns associated with psychopathy but we do not know if
these are induced or congenital. We do know that the direction taken
by those who do not feel the pain of others is conditioned by
childhood. Bernardo might have succeeded as an ordinary sociopath
working his way up the corporate ladder but he chose a different
route, the humiliation, rape, torture and murder of adolescent women.
He blames Homolka for the deaths but murder is not the least of what
he did. His excuse may lie in bad parenting which, like low self-
esteem, is another modern disease. Neither excuses criminal conduct
but both, we now know, are generative of such conduct.

We ignore at our peril the lessons of childhood. Childhood is a
subservient and outsider social status and individual children are
picked out as special bearers of this message, as were Bernardo the
bastard and Homolka of low self-esteem, somewhere in their childhoods.
The status and treatment of children must be called into question in
every case involving the injury of children. While law cannot answer
to all subtleties of inequality and victimization, to child or spouse
to spouse, law can take steps to improve the way we treat children and
youth. However much we love to hate Bernardo and Homolka, neither of
these once-children had to go this way and nor did their many victims-
the victims of Bernardo's rapes in which Homolka acquiesced by not
reporting, the children she procured, the children in whose torture
and death she so actively participated. These children we refuse to
forget. Somewhere we must believe in a redemption of childhood. We are
left otherwise with a hopeless and recurrent evil.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to W. Wesley Pue for his encouragement and helpful
comments in the writing of this article and to research assistants
Rekha Malawaya and Pierette Hebert for their insight into the 'Homolka
problem' and their assistance in bringing this article to publication.

Notes

[1] On sexual connotations in the Bulger killing, see Freeman, 1997.

[2] The associations have a long legal pedigree. Women's weakness
(imbecillitas), vulnerability (infirmitas), cunning (calliditas) and
deception justified their legal disability under Roman law which
defined women in the negative, as not being what men are. Women were
also said to be prone to seduction and to deception in the senses both
of deceiving and being deceived (and perhaps seducing as well as being
seduced). Other recurrent themes are fragility (fragdatas) and
frivolity (levitas). The images are taken up with vigor by
seventeenth-
century English legalists. On women, law and images in a
psychoanalysis of law, see Peter Goodrich (1995) at 115 et seq. and
Chs 5 and 6.

[3] In her Sisters in Crime (1975, cited in Pearson, 1997),
criminologist Freda Adler hypothesized that female aggression will
equal male aggression as women adopt male means of self-empowerment.
Her "liberation hypothesis" has not been borne out. Statistics
collected from United States studies of woman convicted of homicide
suggest that slightly more than half killed persons outside the
domestic circle. A study based on the population of Bedford Hills
Prison in New York State in 1994 shows that of 254 female convicts,
12% killed in the course of a domestic dispute, 10% killed children
through neglect or abuse and the remainder killed out of sexual
jealousy (surely this should count on the domestic side?) or in drug-
related and other business disputes. A review of prison records of
homicidal women in an Alabama women's prison from 1929 to 1985 shows
that 95% of stranger and business homicides committed by white women
were committed after 1970, as were 60% of family and friend murders.
These studies are cited in Patricia Pearson (1997). On problems with
Pearson's work, see note 17.

[4] "The Bernardo case, like every similar investigation, had its
share of human error. But this is not a story of human error or lack
of dedication or investigative skill. It is a story of systemic
failure. It is easy, knowing now that Bernardo was the rapist and the
killer, to ask why he was not identified eadier for what he was. But
the same question and the same problems have arisen in so many other
similar tragedies in other countries. Virtually every
interiurisdictional serial killer case ... demonstrate Tic] the same
problems and raise the same questions. And always the answer turns out
to be the same systemic failure. Always the problems turn out to be
the same, the mistakes the same, and the systemic failures the
same." (Campbell, 1996, p. 1).

[5] I surveyed reports filed by news services (six disks, on file with
the author), evidentiary motions in the Bernardo trial and the Homolka
sentencing transcript. The facts as set out here as far as possible
remain close to the Galligan Report. A few inconsistencies have been
corrected and I have tried to resist the temptation to include
"extras". Materials not in the Galligan Report are placed in brackets.
Detail illuminates yet sickens. Avoiding the pulp literature flowing
from the case has been a pleasure.

[6] The victims' parents were represented by independent counsel in
the investigation and prosecution of the case and the plea bargain.
Doe and her mother agreed that no charges should be laid with respect
to Doe's assaults. "Her unwholesome association with Paul Bernardo and
Karla Homolka consumed a year and a half of her young life. The
ensuing investigations and trial, with the terrible pressures which
they exerted upon her, covered another two and a half years of her
life. Now, almost five years after she first went into that infernal
place which was 57 Bayview Drive, she and her family have asked simply
that she be left alone." (Galligan, 1996, p. 213).

[7] Quoted in Williams (1961).

[8] The agent was John Douglas, whose work inspired Silence of the
Lambs (Makin, 1995). "Criminal probing" is based on weapon, killing
site, position of the body and minute information about the victim and
gives an "experiential" rather than "scientific" portrait of the
killer's habits, age, marital status, occupation and personality
traits. Data was compiled from FBI files and interviews with, among
others, Charles Manson, David (Son of Sam) Berkowitz, Sirhan Sirhan,
John Wayne Gacy and Richard Speck. Serial killers may seek
opportunities to dominate, manipulate and control because their lives
have been dominated and controlled and "for the first time, they've
got somebody. The thrill for them is to see that person begging for
their life, tears streaming down their face. Then finally they throw
the switch and kill them." The metaphor, "throwing the switch", is
derived without comment from the electric chair. While videotaping is
a recent trend, recording and scripting are not. "They usually script
a woman, talk to them while having sex with her and use filthy
language. They script them to say things that are pleasurable to
them." Douglas's profiling was less accurate in the Canadian case of
Guy Paul Morin, arrested in 1985 for the murder of Christine Jessop
and exonerated by DNA testing after serving almost ten years in
prison. Lies of witnesses continue to be acknowledged. As a result of
the Morin disaster, Douglas no longer supports the death penalty: by
the time he was exonerated in Canada, Morin would have been executed
had he lived in almost any US state.

[9] R.u Bernardo [voir dim, admissibility of evidence of spousal abuse
of Karla Homolka] [1995] OJ No. 1380 DRS 95-14624 Court File No.
274/94 (Ontario Court of Justice (General Division) LeSage ACJOC, 17
May 1995 (pare. 37).

[10] R.v. Bernardo [voir dire, admissibility of psychiatric evidence
on Karla Homolka] [1995] OJ No. 2249 DRS 95-15614 Court File No.
274/94 (Ontario Court of Justice (General Division) LeSage ACJOC, 27
July 1995 (pare. 8).

[11] R.v. Bernardo [voir dim, admissibility of evidence seized in
Bernardo's home] [1995] OJ No. 1394 Court File No. 274/94 (Ontario
Court of Justice (General Division) LeSage ACJOC, 17 May 1995 (pare.
4).

[12] R.u. Bernardo [vo* dim, admissibility of psychiatric evidence on
Karla Homolka] [1995] OJ No. 2249 DRS 95-15614 Court File No. 274/94
(Ontario Court of Justice (General Division) LeSage ACJOC, 27 July
1995.

[13] Galligan discusses plea bargaining or "resolution agreements" in
some detail, concluding that it is entirely acceptable in principle
and Homolka's bargain was appropriate and appropriately managed,
meeting the standard set out in the Martin Report (1993). The Report
recommends full disclosure of the agreement and of all aggravating
factors, irrespective of charges laid, and stresses victim
participation by way of impact statements and consultation on the
prosecution of the case. Galligan gives as example the Ontario case of
R. u Helmut Buxbaum (1989), 70 Criminal Reports (3d) 20. "We do not
live in a Utopia", the judge observed, and "the so-called deal happens
thousands of times a day in Canada" (p. 68). Buxbaum, a wealthy
businessman, hired a hit man who hired hit men who hired helpers to
kill his wife. In this surfeit of murderers, some were guiltier than
others and Buxbaum as prime mover and his first accomplice were
guiltiest of all. Galligan was counsel for one of the hired hit men
and obtained for his client a large sentence discount for testifying
for the Crown.

[14] R.u. Bernardo [1995] OJ No. 1472 DRS 95-16117 Court No. 274/94
(Ontario Court of Justice (General Division) LeSage ACJOC, 29 May 1995
(pares 124, 125). "Although it is difficult to rationalize why the
verbal, but not the pictorial, images may be publicly displayed, I can
only try to analogize as I have in an eadierruling that traditionally
we do not display, for public viewing, photographs of dead bodies,
close-up photographs of wounds, photographs of autopsies, photographs
of exhumations, and similar type evidence. Nevertheless, viva voce
evidence of the witnesses who describe what is depicted in the
photographs referred to is always heard in open Court. When Capital
Punishment was in effect, in Canada, the executions were not carried
out in public. This practice and policy was not because persons who
voluntarily chose to attend would be shocked or horrified, but rather,
in my view, because we, as a society, believed that it debases
humanly."

[15] Rut Bernardo [uoir dire, admissibility of psychiatric evidence on
Kada Homolka] [1995] OJ No. 2249 DRS 95-15614 Court File No. 274/94
(Ontario Court of Justice (General Division) LeSage ACJOC, 27 July
1995 (pare. ...