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Citation: People Weekly, Nov 22, 1993 v40 n21 p115(3)

THE BRIDE AND GROOM -- YOUNG, BLOND AND ATTRACTIVE -- were as
perfect as their elaborate wedding, planned down to the last
detail. She was a 23-year-old veterinary assistant, he an
accountant five years her senior, and they gathered to exchange
their vows before 125 friends and relatives in a quaint Canadian
village near Niagara Falls. Afterward, on that lovely Saturday in
June 1991, the guests supped on pheasant and fine champagne at
the Queens Landing Inn and watched Karla Homolka and Paul
Bernardo ride off into the sunset in a horse-drawn carriage.

For a time the newlyweds seemed to live happily ever after -- a
couple so clean-cut that their neighbors in Port Dalhousie, Ont.,
called them Ken and Barbie. But that image was shattered less
than two years after their wedding, when Bernardo was arrested
for the Scarborough rapes -- a series of violent sex crimes
committed from 1987 to 1990 against 19 women that had terrorized
the so-called Golden Horseshoe, the heavily populated region
along western Lake Ontario from Toronto to Niagara Falls.
Bernardo and Homolka have also been charged in the deaths of two
teenage girls, Leslie Mahaffy, 14, and Kristen French, 15. Last
summer, Homolka was convicted of manslaughter for her role in the
murders. Bernardo, who now faces two first-degree-murder charges
and 48 sex-related charges, will go on trial next April.

The sensational arrest and Homolka's subsequent trial have filled
Canada's newspapers and tabloid-TV shows, even though Ontario
Court General Division has declared a near-total information
blackout to ensure that Bernardo receives a fair trial. The ban
has only fed the media frenzy, as lurid rumors of snuff videos
and sales of body parts gripped the nation. Barred from
disclosing any facts, reporters who covered Homolka's trial would
say only that the details were so ghastly that some journalists
wept. "You could hear the sobbing all over the courtroom," says
one Toronto reporter.

What is known is grim enough. Authorities say Bernardo had
allegedly raped and murdered only a short time before he was
married. On the same June afternoon that he and Homolka exchanged
vows, in fact, Leslie Mahaffy's body was discovered in nearby
Lake Gibson. Or most of it was. Her corpse had been dismembered
with a power saw, and the limbs embedded in several hunks of
concrete. Police believe that the ninth grader had been sexually
assaulted before her death.

Less than a year later, police say, Bernardo killed 15-year-old
Kristen French, who had disappeared two weeks earlier on her way
home from school in St. Catharines -- a blue-collar city of
131,000 just outside Niagara Falls. She was found in a ditch 30
miles from her home, naked, with her long dark hair shorn. She
too had been sexually assaulted, and police believe she had been
kept alive for most of the two weeks she was missing. "You
wonder, `What did she actually go through?' " said her father,
Doug French, 62, a salesman for a rubber company. "That is the
part that really disturbs us."

Toronto police had actually questioned Bernardo in 1990, before
either girl was killed, in connection with the Scarborough rapes
but had been unable to make an arrest. He had become a suspect
because he bore a striking resemblance to a composite sketch of
the rapist, whom many victims described as having boy-next-door
looks. Bernardo's friends had even commented on the likeness when
the sketch appeared in the Toronto Sun. "You could say Paul
didn't have a sense of humor about it," says Van Smirnis, 28, who
grew up across the street from Bernardo in Scarborough and was
best man at his wedding. Except for the sketch, however,
authorities found no evidence linking Bernardo to the attacks. So
they collected a DNA sample from him (and from hundreds of other
possible suspects) and continued their investigation.

Even in retrospect, his friend Smirnis admits, it is difficult to
imagine Bernardo as a killer. Handsome and smart, Bernardo "never
let on that he was anything other than a model citizen," Smirnis
says. In high school, Bernardo played on several teams and was an
excellent student who "rarely studied [but] got A's," Smirnis
says. Bernardo's main interest, though, was the opposite sex. "As
long as the girl was reasonably good-looking, he'd go out with
her," says Smirnis. Bernardo wrote in his 1982 high school
yearbook that one of his goals was to become rich and famous so
he could go to California and "check out girls on the beach."

That's why Smirnis was surprised when his best friend settled
down so quickly with Karla Homolka. Bernardo had graduated from
the University of Toronto in three years and was working as an
accountant at Price Waterhouse in Toronto when he met Homolka,
then 17. She was in town from St. Catharines, attending a
pet-shop convention.

The quiet, petite Homolka fell instantly in love with the dashing
Bernardo. She wrote in her high school yearbook that her only
wish was to marry him. And Bernardo made it clear his intentions
were serious. He began making the two-hour trip every weekend
from Scarborough to Homolka's home in St. Catharines, where she
lived with her parents, Karel, a salesman, and Dorothy, a
hospital worker. The Homolkas saw Bernardo as "the perfect
son-in-law," Smirnis says.

On Christmas Eve, 1990, while the Homolkas were occupied
upstairs, Paul and Karla were with Karla's 15-year-old sister,
Tammy, when the girl died in front of their eyes. She allegedly
choked to death on her own vomit after drinking a mixture of rum
and eggnog. Paul told police that his attempts to resuscitate the
girl had failed, and her death was ruled accidental. Soon
afterward, Paul and Karla got engaged and moved to a
$1,150-a-month, Cape Cod-style house in Port Dalhousie.

After the Bernardos' 1991 wedding, Smirnis and his wife, Joanne,
noticed some troubling things about the relationship. "He would
control every facet of Karla's life," says Van, and wouldn't even
let her touch his clothes. Joanne claims Paul tried to prevent
her and Karla from becoming friends. "There were a few incidents
where he'd blow up," she says. "Karla would start crying, and I'd
try to comfort her, and he'd say, `Just stay out of my marriage.'
" Even the couple's pets aroused Bernardo's fury. Smirnis says he
once watched Bernardo grill and eat Karla's lizard after it bit
him.

In January 1992, Bernardo may have finally gone too far. He
allegedly attacked Karla with a flashlight, hitting her so hard
that her left eye was partly dislodged from the socket. The
police charged Bernardo with assault, and as soon as Karla was
released from the hospital, she hired a Niagara Falls lawyer. She
then spent the next several weeks in top-secret negotiations with
police and prosecutors, though it is unclear whether she led
police to her husband or not. At the same time, the results from
Bernardo's DNA tests -- delayed for more than two years at a
shorthanded police lab -- at last linked him to the Scarborough
rapes.

On Feb. 17 police surrounded the Port Dalhousie house and
arrested Bernardo for the Scarborough rapes. Police also
immediately reopened their investigation into Tammy Homolka's
death. (Ontario's deputy chief coroner has told reporters that
the exhumation of her body was "well worthwhile," but refuses to
elaborate.) Finally, in May, Karla Homolka appeared in court and
was charged with manslaughter. The next day, Bernardo was charged
with the first-degree murder of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen
French.

While Karla serves 12 years in the Kingston Prison for Women, and
Paul (who has changed his last name to Teale, reportedly to hide
his Portuguese heritage) awaits trial in Toronto's Metro East
Detention Centre, the families of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen
French are struggling to piece their lives back together.

Both girls' mothers, Debbie Mahaffy and Donna French, say they
and their other children are plagued by nightmares, and Mahaffy,
a former schoolteacher, spent 212 months in a hospital receiving
psychiatric treatment for her grief. At times she still finds it
difficult to do simple tasks. She has tried to focus her energy
on a cause close to her heart -- victims' rights -- by waging a
petition campaign against serial-killer trading cards and
organizing a support network for families of murder victims. But
she dreads having to live through her daughter's death all over
again when Paul Bernardo comes to trial next spring. "I divorce
myself from [Bernardo and Homolka]. I don't allow them to have
any more power than they already have," Mahaffy says, speaking,
she hopes, for Donna French and the other victims as well. "It's
too tragic already that so many people have died and been hurt."

 
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