Criminal Minds (19 page)

Before finally killing themselves shortly after noon, they had murdered twelve students and one teacher and injured twenty-one other students. Three more students were hurt trying to escape the slaughter.

Harris and Klebold were deeply disturbed young men, both of whom had been in trouble with the law. They planned their attack for a year before they carried it out, posting bits and pieces of their plan online and keeping detailed journals of their preparations. They were part of a clique that was known as the Trenchcoat Mafia because of the members’ habit of wearing black trench coats to school. Although they were often bullied and tormented by the school’s jocks, and speculation has pointed to that (as well as to the influence of video games and heavy metal music) as a factor, the exact cause of or motive for the tragic assault will never be fully understood, since both students committed suicide at the scene.

Aaron Hotchner mentions the Columbine Killers in the episode “The Perfect Storm” (203) while discussing murder teams.

SARAH JEAN DAWES,
in the episode “Riding the Lightning” (114), is on death row, scheduled to be executed for murdering at least twelve teenage girls with her husband, Jacob. The argument is made that there are no genuine serial-killer couples, and she is eventually shown to be innocent of the crimes to which she admitted.

It’s true that serial-killer couples are rare, especially in the United States. But they’re not unheard of, the man almost always “in charge” and the woman abused and isolated. The most famous North American example, and the pair most like Sarah Jean and Jacob, is probably the Canadian rape-and-murder team of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.

 

 

PAUL KENNETH BERNARDO
was born on August 27, 1964, in Toronto, Ontario, into a severely dysfunctional family. His mother, Marilyn, was married at the time, but Bernardo’s father was not her husband. The husband, Kenneth Bernardo, was abusive toward his wife and was later charged with child molestation and with sexually abusing the daughter whom he and Marilyn had had together. Marilyn became depressed, withdrawn, and morbidly obese.

At sixteen, Bernardo was devastated to learn the real circumstances of his birth. His relations with his parents, which had been tenuous at best, grew worse. When he went away to college, he began beating and humiliating the women he dated, purposely seeking out women who appeared to be the submissive type.

In May 1987, his career as the Scarborough Rapist began; he was named for the Toronto suburb in which he lived and operated. By the time he met Karla Homolka in October, he had raped twice and attempted a third rape.

Homolka, by contrast, seemed well adjusted. She was beautiful, blond, popular, and smart. An animal lover who worked at a veterinary clinic, she was seventeen when she met Bernardo at a pet convention in Toronto. Within two hours, they were in a hotel room having sex. Homolka was submissive, allowed herself to be bound during sex, and gave Bernardo everything he wanted in that area.

It wasn’t long before she knew that he was the Scarborough Rapist, and she not only condoned his activity but encouraged it. On at least one occasion she recorded Bernardo’s assault with a video camera. Eventually a composite drawing of the rapist was released, and so many people noted Bernardo’s resemblance to it that the police picked him up and questioned him. He convinced them of his innocence, and they let him go. By then, a darker phase of his life was about to begin.

One thing had always bothered Bernardo about his new girlfriend: the fact that she wasn’t a virgin when they met. But her fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy, was, so Bernardo wanted Tammy as a replacement virgin. As usual, Homolka not only agreed but assisted. She stole animal anesthetic from the veterinary lab where she worked, and at dinner at the Homolka family’s home, a few days before Christmas in 1990, she spiked her sister’s drinks with a powerful sedative. After the rest of the family had gone to bed, Homolka held a rag soaked with anesthetic over Tammy’s face, and while Bernardo raped Tammy, her older sister videotaped the whole thing.

In “Riding the Lightning,” after interviewing a married couple sitting on death row for serial murder, the team races against time to prove the wife’s innocence.

Tammy had eaten a big meal, however, so she vomited and then choked to death. Bernardo and Homolka quickly dressed her, hid their drugs and video gear, and called an ambulance.

With Tammy dead, Bernardo still felt cheated. Determined to make it up to him, Homolka settled on a wedding gift for her husband-to-be: a teenager, a friend of Homolka’s, who looked quite a bit like Tammy. When the time came, Homolka knocked the girl out with the animal sedatives, then sexually assaulted her for Bernardo’s viewing enjoyment. She took over the camera and recorded Bernardo deflowering the girl and anally raping her. In the morning, the girl awoke, sore but unaware of what had been done to her.

They let that victim live, but having killed once, they were quite willing to do so again. One night Bernardo came upon fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffey, who was locked out of her parents’ house after missing her curfew. Bernardo blindfolded her and took her home, where he and Homolka both sexually molested her, then killed her. To dispose of the evidence—except what they had recorded on videotape—they cut her into pieces, encased them in cement, and threw it all into Lake Gibson.

The pieces of Mahaffey were found two weeks later, on June 29, 1991, the day Bernardo and Homolka wed.

On April 16, 1992, Homolka approached fifteen-year-old Kristen French in a church parking lot and persuaded her to come over to her car, which Bernardo then forced her into at knifepoint. They kept her for three days, sexually assaulting, beating, and torturing her, and capturing the whole ordeal on video before they finally killed her.

Other women are believed to have been raped and/or murdered by Bernardo and Homolka, but those allegations have never been proven. The pair’s run came to an end when Bernardo brutally beat Homolka and her parents called the cops.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Homolka blamed everything on Bernardo. She made a deal that would give her two twelve-year sentences, served concurrently, with parole eligibility after three years for good behavior. All she had to do was tell the truth about the crimes. After her trial and sentencing, the videotapes surfaced. When they were shown at Bernardo’s trial, the prosecutors realized that they had made a terrible mistake with Homolka’s plea bargain—she was not the innocent victim she had pretended to be.

Bernardo was convicted of kidnapping, rape, and murder on September 1, 1995, and remains in prison, whereas Homolka was released from prison on July 4, 2005. She remarried, changed her name to Leanne Teale, and has a son.

 

 

YEARS BEFORE
Bernardo and Homolka, the Sunset Strip Murders rocked a Los Angeles that was still staggering from the Hillside Stranglers and Bittaker and Norris.

On June 12, 1980, the bodies of two teenage girls showed up near the Ventura Freeway. Both had been shot, and there was evidence of necrophilia. The bodies were identified as Cynthia Chandler, sixteen, and her stepsister, Gina Chandler, fifteen; both were frequent runaways who’d seen their share of trouble. Two more bodies, both of prostitutes, were discovered on June 23. One woman’s head was missing. Both hookers had been shot, and those bullets were a ballistics match to the Chandler girls’.

The head was found four days later, ensconced in a wooden box in an alley. The cut marks on the neck matched those on the decapitated corpse from the June 23 murders.

By the time a fifth victim appeared, on June 30, the media had attached the name the Sunset Strip Murders to the killings. This victim was also a young woman, shot three times, and her stomach was slit open.

In an unexpected twist, the sixth and final victim in this series was a man, who was discovered rotting inside his sealed van on August 9. His head had been cut off and he’d been stabbed and slashed multiple times, in addition to being shot. Shell casings found in the van matched those of the previous murders.

Two days later, Carol Bundy (no relation to Ted) broke down and told her coworkers that she had killed some people. Someone called the police, and Bundy was picked up. She turned over evidence, including panties belonging to some of the victims, and a photo album showing her boyfriend, Douglas Clark, sexually abusing an eleven-year-old girl. Bundy said that she had killed the man, a country bar singer named Jack Murray, but that Clark had killed the women and had helped her to decapitate Murray.

Bundy described an existence not unlike Karla Homolka’s. Clark didn’t just want a girlfriend, he wanted a sex slave, and Bundy willingly played that role. When Clark was bored with her, he would bring prostitutes home. One day he came home covered in blood. He told her about having murdered the Chandler girls, whom he had picked up, molested, and then killed. After they were dead, he had sex with the bodies and then dumped them.

His tale excited Bundy, and she let him know it. That night, when the TV news reported that a man was dead in the trunk of a car, Clark took credit for that killing as well.

When Clark went hunting again, Bundy joined him. They picked up a hooker, and Clark shot her in the head while she was performing oral sex on him. Bundy’s excitement at watching this could hardly be contained. After dumping the body and dropping Bundy off, Clark found another hooker. This one bit him—an involuntary reaction when he shot her—and in his anger he cut off her head. Seeing yet another hooker nearby, he shot and dumped her, then took the severed head home to Bundy to use as a sex toy.

Clark went out without Bundy on August 1, taking with him instead the eleven-year-old girl with whom he had been photographed. He picked up a hooker and had sex with her while the girl watched, then dropped the girl off at her home and shot the hooker. After raping the corpse, he dumped her, too.

Bundy turned to country singer Jack Murray, an occasional lover, for comfort, and revealed some of her recent activities. When Murray threatened to tell the cops, she silenced him.

At least, that was Bundy’s version of things. In Clark’s version, the same basic acts took place, but he hadn’t done any of the killing. Bundy, he said, imagined herself to be Ted Bundy’s wife, and she had enticed Murray into her delusion. Bundy and Murray had done all of the murders and then blamed Clark.

Finally, the bodies of the other hookers Clark had shot were located, and in one of them, ballistics comparisons proved that the bullet came from the same gun that had been used in some of the other murders. This and other evidence were enough to earn Clark six death sentences, and he’s still on San Quentin’s death row. Bundy died of heart failure in prison in 2003.

 

 

HOWEVER PERVERSE
these North American couples were, they had a pair of British counterparts whose depravity makes them look like amateurs by comparison. From 1967 to 1987, Fred and Rosemary West of Gloucester, England, raped, tortured, and murdered at least ten women and girls (although Fred later put the figure at closer to thirty). In addition to casual acquaintances, their victims included Fred’s first wife and his three daughters from that marriage. The wife and two of the daughters were murdered (one of the daughters was cut into pieces and buried in the yard). The third daughter was repeatedly raped by Fred and his friends and was later impregnated by Fred.