Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (27 page)

When she was sixteen or seventeen she showed faint marks on her wrists to schoolfriends and admitted that
she’d cut herself because sometimes she didn’t want to live. Friends put this down to attention seeking - and psychiatrists would later describe her personality as histrionic, borderline. Karla had been brought up in a home where the lack of money was always a topic for discussion - so now she wanted to marry a rich man who would buy her a big house and many other material things. She and her sisters continued to suffer from asthma, and there’s often an emotional component to this.

Beginning to rebel, Karla’s favourite song became
Fight
For
Your
Right
To
Party,
possibly because her
parents
preferred her to bring her friends home rather than for her to go out on the town where they couldn’t keep an eye on her. Her father was protective towards all three of his beautiful daughters, referring to them as ‘his girls.’ But Karla was now a young woman who wore handcuffs on her jacket as a fashion statement and who toyed with the idea of becoming a detective. She needed an identity - and a man - of her own.

Whilst still a schoolgirl, Karla had taken part time work in a pet store and was very good at it. She seemed to love the animals she was selling, and made sure that they were properly exercised, watered and
fed. Indeed, her boss was so impressed that he sent her to an out of town Pets Convention with a female friend.

The convention took place in October 1987 and involved an excited Karla staying in a hotel overnight. She wanted to make the most of this unusual freedom, so flirted heavily when she met tall, blonde and handsome Paul Barnardo and his friend in the hotel’s coffee bar. The two men made a habit of cruising around and picking up girls and the charming Paul enjoyed far more conquests than the average male.

Karla was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who looked younger than her years, Paul a trainee accountant aged twenty-three who liked very young teenagers. Karla and her friend and Paul and his friend talked, laughed and eventually went up to the girls’ room. Someone put off the light and within moments Karla and Paul were having sex on top of her bed. The other couple lay there in embarrassed silence listening to over three hours of enthusiastic coupling sounds before everyone eventually fell asleep.

Paul was Karla’s second lover and she fell hard, telling friends that she’d fallen in love with him the moment she set eyes on him. He was physically
attractive
and superficially charming and they were sexually very compatible and willing to experiment. They made a striking couple, both tanned and blonde and sometimes dressed in identical T-shirts. She was tiny
and classically feminine-looking whilst he was broad shouldered and tall.

But behind Paul’s handsome face and fit body lurked a hatred of women. It was a hatred that had been sculpted from years of abuse from his completely dysfunctional family. His parents wouldn’t allow any of his childhood friends into the house - and his mother’s idea of a family meal was to open a tin of macaroni. Yet the family were affluent, spending money on nice cars and a big house.

Ken, who Paul originally thought was his father, would veer between ignoring him and shouting at him. Ken hit all three of the children if they took a few
seconds
to respond to his commands and Marilyn screamed at them with the slightest provocation. She became increasingly hypochondriacal, though - unlike most toxic parents - she ultimately had the courage to seek psychiatric help. But one day in a fit of rage she told Paul than Ken wasn’t his biological father, but the result of an affair she had had.

In some ways, Paul should have been glad as by now Ken had been exposed as a Peeping Tom and would later be convicted of sexually abusing a minor. But Paul had admired Ken’s immaculate dress sense
and his success in accountancy and was desolate to find out that a stranger was his real dad.

Ken often made derogatory remarks about women and Paul now began to do the same. By his late teens he was talking of how much he’d like to rape a girl and said he dreamed of setting up a ‘Virgin Farm’ where young girls would do whatever he desired.

He started making obscene phone calls to a friend’s ex-girlfriend in 1986, the calls eventually being traced by the police. Paul then had a restraining order placed on him. Soon his activities would escalate into much more serious crimes. He committed his first rape, of a girlfriend, several months before meeting Karla, and would go on to rape many others, becoming known in the Canadian press as the Scarborough Rapist. He pounced on his victims as they walked home through Scarborough’s darkened streets.

At first Paul wooed the teenage Karla with flowers and cuddly toys. He also ingratiated himself with her family until they started referring to him as the son they had never had. Paul lived an almost two hour drive away from Karla’s house and was soon exhausted by driving back and forward between the two houses, so her
parents invited him to start sleeping over each weekend on the settee.

One source suggests that Karla couldn’t talk to her mother about sex so Paul had to sneak into her bedroom when the rest of the family were sleeping. Another source says that Dorothy knew Paul stayed in Karla’s room and would tap on the door to alert him each morning so that he was out of there before Mr Homolka came downstairs.

What is certain is that the couple were having increasingly adventurous sex. Karla had worn handcuffs on her jacket as a fashion statement and now invited Paul to use them on her. Later he asked her to buy a dog chain which he would tighten around her neck whilst they made love.

Karla clearly found this powerplay exciting and started to refer to Paul as her ‘big, bad businessman’ but when she told her school girl friends they were shocked. Like most teenagers they were somewhat puritanical and harsh in judging others, and decided that the couple’s roleplay was unnatural. But at this stage Karla and Paul’s sexual games were consensual and they weren’t hurting anyone else.

As the months passed, this was to change. Like most sadists, Paul was looking for his girlfriend’s Achilles heel, finding out facts with which he could belittle her. He found it when Karla admitted that she wasn’t a virgin, having had sex with a previous boyfriend after
he’d left the area and she’d taken a plane to spend a weekend with him. Karla slept with this youth at the first opportunity, just as she did with Paul. When free of her parental home she was desperate to forge an early intimacy with any goodlooking man.

Paul told Karla that her loss of virginity was a fault, something that she could literally rectify by offering him her virgin rectum. She did so, though she found it painful. Later she would lick his anus whilst masturbating him and would repeat the words that most aroused him. ‘I’m your little cocksucker. I’m your little slut. I’m your little cunt.’

Paul had also began to criticise other things about pretty and slender Karla. Leastways, she started to write herself demeaning self-improvement lists. Friends saw these lists and were horrified that the formerly outspoken teenager was becoming so self-conscious. One such list included the words ‘Remember you’re stupid. Remember you’re ugly. Remember you’re fat.’

She also wrote a reminder to herself to never let anyone know that the relationship was less than perfect. In this, she may have been mimicking her parents, for some people were only shown the Homolkas behaving like the perfect family, and mainly heard about the underlying discord second hand.

Karla’s first goal in life was to get married, and she told all of her schoolfriends that she was desperate to
become Mrs Barnardo. She seemed to see the state of matrimony as the most important thing in the world - rather than the quality of the marriage, the genuine love for each other that a couple can have.

That said, she did seem to love Paul in a typically over-the-top teenage way, sending him a note that said ‘You’re a dream come true.’ Later in that same note she became sexually explicit: ‘You know what I love? Having you stick it inside me and making me gasp for air when my parents are in the next room. I love it when you shoot it into my mouth. I want to swallow every drop and then some. The power you wield over me is indescribable… With you in my life I feel complete. Whole.’

Whilst still at school she started dropping huge hints to Paul about wanting an engagement ring. He obliged by buying a large expensive one which Karla showed off at every opportunity. Needless to say, this gave her added status amongst her schoolfriends, most of whom thought that Paul was a fantastic catch. A few of the more mature girls realised that he was more talk than action - but the majority were impressed by his good looks, nice car and expensive clothes. Paul was an immature twenty-something who got on well with
impressionable teenagers. Lori’s teenage boyfriend would originally be impressed by Paul.

Karla now gave up her plans to go to university because Paul didn’t want her to. That meant giving up her dream of leaving her parents home and studying to become a veterinary surgeon. For years she had spoken of university as a way out - but now her friends said she saw Paul as her means of escape. The little asthmatic girl who had loved drawing houses was now a shallow teenager who longed for a beautiful house of her own.

Ironically, she was letting less and less of her life remain her own. Early on in the relationship Paul had suggested she stop dying her multi-coloured hair, stop cutting it and let it return to its natural blonde. This she did, even though she tired of it being so long and unmanageable. He also disapproved of her punk-style clothes so soon she was wearing soft sweaters and adopting the preppy style she’d once mocked. Paul loathed overweight and badly dressed women like his mother, so Karla became extra careful about what she wore and ate. Later she would become a much stronger character but for now she was hellbent on pleasing her man, on maintaining the relationship.

Karla left school and found herself a job at a vetinary surgery. She loved the work and her employer was very impressed by her skills, noting she was equally good at working in every aspect of animal health care. But she had to get up early every day to take the bus to
work because Paul didn’t want her to learn to drive. Her fiance was showing increasing signs of being a control freak - and Karla was letting herself be controlled.

The next three years passed in this way with the couple enjoying lavish nights out with friends or sipping cocktails around the Homolka’s poolside. There were many good times - invariably captured on video - but whenever they had an argument Karla would end up backing down and writing Paul an incredibly obsequious note. Like Carol Bundy, profiled earlier, Karla was determined to maintain her relationship against all the odds.

Like most embryonic serial killers, Paul had quickly tired of ordinary sex and found it increasingly difficult to maintain an erection with his by now twenty-year-old girlfriend, Karla. As such immature men often do, he turned his attention to increasingly young girls - and Karla’s little sister Tammy fitted the bill.

Tammy, fifteen, had something of a crush on him, as did many of her school friends. After all, Paul was a six foot tall handsome man with an easy - if superficial - charm. Tammy, with her long blonde hair and wide smile looked very much like a younger Karla, a fact that
Paul exploited by getting Karla to dress up in Tammy’s clothes. Karla would murmur that her name was Tammy and that she was a virgin, an image that would stimulate Paul into having sex.

Paul also started standing beside Tammy’s bed and masturbating whilst the teenager slept. Karla stood as look-out in the door, her main concern being that her parents didn’t wake up and find out. She was showing what one psychiatrist would later term a ‘moral vacuity’ and didn’t seem to see this as a violation of her sister’s rights.

By late 1990 the couple had been dating for three years and Paul’s interest in Karla seemed to have waned. It’s possible that she tolerated Paul’s interest in her younger sister because it allowed her to keep him in her home. There they raced around with the camcorder that Karla had purchased, videoing all of the Homolkas who were drinking cocktails and eating snacks. Paul was actually dating other women in his home town and having rough sex with them, something Karla probably suspected or even knew.

One day Paul took Tammy out with him to buy alcohol, a twenty minute journey. The pair didn’t return for six hours and when they did Paul admitted that he’d been kissing the younger girl and fooling around.

It’s likely that Karla was very jealous - though she would later deny that in court when challenged about her motivation for setting up her sister. Karla said that
Paul kept badgering her to fix it so that he could take Tammy’s virginity and that he nagged on and on until she agreed.

Because of Karla’s work at the vets, she had access to animal pharmaceuticals. She read up on the subject and brought home Halcion tablets, which she and Paul ground into a powder. Then they asked Tammy if she wanted to stay up late with them and watch a horror video. Desperate to feel more grown-up, the girl agreed. It was Christmas Eve and Tammy’s virginity was to be Karla’s festive gift to Paul. The couple mixed cocktails for the entire family but only put the drug into the innocent teenager’s drink.

Lori went to bed first, followed by Karla’s parents. They saw that Tammy looked tired - and that her speech was slurred - and suggested she also retire for the night, but she mumbled that she wanted to stay up and watch the movie. Paul then gave her a further drink containing a sleeping draught and she slipped into a deep sleep or actual unconsciousness.

Karla then fetched a container of Halothane, a powerful animal anaesthetic that she’d also stolen from her boss. She soaked a rag with it and held it to her sister’s nose and mouth. Halothane is normally inhaled with the careful use of monitoring equipment but Karla was just guessing the dose. Through the rape and sexual assault which followed, she would give her fifteen-year-old sister six times the amount used to knock out a large dog.

As a vet’s assistant, Karla must also have known that animals - and people - musn’t eat or drink before being given an anaesthetic as the risk of vomiting and choking are considerable. Moreover, one of Halothane’s side effects was that it could cause nausea. Poor Tammy had been eating pasta and drinking alcohol so she was clearly at risk.

Paul got the camcorder, switched it on and put it on the floor next to the unconscious fifteen-year-old. ‘Put on a condom,’ Karla said, still holding the rag over her sister’s face. Paul ignored her request and began to undress the helpless teenager. He began to rape the girl, with Karla - whose only concern seemed to be her parent’s fury - constantly telling him to hurry up.

Paul then turned the girl over and sodomised her - the drugs had relaxed her sphincter muscles and made penetration easy. After he withdrew he told Karla to suck on Tammy’s breasts, the camcorder capturing the entire assault. Paul then told her to perform oral sex on the teenager and when Karla refused because Tammy was menstruating he pushed her head down between Tammy’s legs. The video continued, with Paul demanding that Karla digitally enter her sister. She did and he asked her how her blood-covered finger tasted. ‘Fucking disgusting,’ she says, pulling a face.

It’s clear that Karla doesn’t want to taste Tammy’s menstrual blood yet she’s indifferent to Paul raping and sodomising the younger girl.

Karla now held the camera whilst Paul raped and sodomised the teenager a second time. He then withdrew saying that he thought something was wrong, that she’d stopped breathing. When they turned Tammy over her face had turned blue. ‘Oh my God, I think I just killed my sister,’ Karla shrieked.

The couple tried to resuscitate the girl, dressed her, moved her to another room and called the emergency services. They - and others - noticed a red mark around Tammy’s nostrils, her mouth and even on her left shoulder, as if she’d vomited some caustic agent up. When asked, Karla and Paul said that it must be a rug burn because they’d dragged her into another room where the light was better in order to resuscitate her. This made no sense as they wouldn’t have dragged her face down.

Dorothy, Karel and Lori got up when the police and ambulance arrived and were told that Tammy had stopped breathing. Medics worked hard to get her heart started again. In shock, the Homolkas followed their comatose youngest daughter to the hospital.

Meanwhile a policeman stopped Karla from putting a comforter that Tammy had been lying on, and which might be needed as evidence, into the washing machine. The couple gave statements - which said that they’d been watching a movie and suddenly noticed Tammy had stopped breathing - then they were allowed to go.

Tammy died the next day. In the interim period, Karla didn’t tell the medics that she’d given the teenager powerful veterinary drugs. Perhaps this knowledge would have enabled the hospital staff to save her. The subsequent autopsy ruled that the death was accidental, that Tammy Lyn had choked on her own vomit. The fact that she’d been drugged and
menstruating
presumably hid the telltale signs that she’d been raped anally and vaginally by twenty-six-year old Paul.

Strangely, the autopsy didn’t show anything untoward, though the red burn mark on Tammy’s face, neck and shoulder remained inexplicable. Death was put down to Tammy choking on her own vomit after imbibing a little alcohol. Despite the makeup skills of the morticians, the mark was still visible when she lay in her open casket on her burial day. The fact that Karla, her big sister, had been present the entire time that Paul and Tammy were together presumably stopped the authorities from suspecting foul play.