Free Killer Couples by Tammy Cohen Page A

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka’s sex slave.
    As the video camera rolled, the terrified schoolgirl was repeatedly raped and forced to participate in twisted X-rated role-plays, all choreographed and scripted by Bernardo.
    ‘I love you,’ she was made to say again and again, just as his previous rape victims had had to do.
    ‘You’re the master. You’re the most powerful man in the world.’
    There was no humiliation Kristen didn’t have to endure. Bernardo urinated on his victim, he attempted to defecate on her, he filmed her endlessly on the toilet, and of course he filmed her being made to have sex with Karla. In one bizarre excerpt, he taped the two women in the bathroom chatting about perfume.
    ‘Just talk among yourselves, girls’ stuff,’ he demanded. As if Kristen might just be able to put aside the knowledge that she’d been abducted and was being held as a slave by a sexual sadist and his complicit wife to make small talk about scent!
    But Paul Bernardo was fast losing his grip on reality. Twiceover the three days, he went off in the car to get a take-out meal to bring home to his ‘prize’, leaving Kristen tied up in a bedroom closet. Twice, Karla had a chance to free Kristen, and twice she turned a deaf ear to the girl’s desperate pleas.
    That Karla Homolka was scared of her husband’s violent temper is in no doubt. That she had learned how doing everything he told her without protesting was the only way to avoid being his human punchbag is also on balance of probability true. But could you, no matter how great your fear, no matter how deeply you’d been conditioned to be obedient, imagine listening to a young girl crying for her parents and not be moved to help her? Could you hear her beg for her life, knowing what hell she’d just been through and having a very good idea of what was in store for her, and not set her free?
    Of course you couldn’t. But Karla Homolka could. She knew she was heavily implicated in Leslie Mahaffy’s death and now in Kristen French’s abduction and rape. And what about the death of her own sister, Tammy? No, she simply had too much to lose to let Kristen go. And, lacking in any inbuilt moral compass, she simply didn’t feel the compulsion to do the right thing that most people are guided by. Instead, in thrall to her domineering husband and shallow enough to put herself first at all times, she stood by and did nothing.
    That Saturday evening, Paul went out to get Swiss-style take-out chicken. Later that night, Kristen was dead. Once again, the once golden couple would later tell wildly diverging stories about how she died. Paul would claim that he’d come back from gettingthe take-out to find Kristen dead, apparently having strangled herself on the cord round her neck during an altercation with Karla as she attempted to escape. Karla, meanwhile, would point the finger squarely at her husband, recalling how he’d pulled the electric cord tight around the young girl’s neck later that night after yet another videotaped rape, holding it for a full seven minutes to make sure she was dead.
    Whatever the truth, one fact is irrefutable. As soon as Kristen French saw Paul and Karla’s faces, right at the outset in that church car park, her fate was sealed. The Bernardos knew they’d be facing life imprisonment if she was able to identify them. Kristen French would have to die. The only question was when – and how.
    That Easter Sunday morning saw Paul and Karla Bernardo doing an extra zealous spring clean. Neighbours listening to them vacuuming the carpets, even in the car, approved of how nicely the couple were keeping their house. Some tenants thought that because a house was rented, you could treat it with disrespect and allow it to fall into complete disrepair, but luckily the Bernardos weren’t like that.
    After meticulously cleaning the house and Kristen’s body, right down to chopping off her long brown hair and burning it in the fireplace in case it would