Paul Bernardo | Biography

Dubbed by the media as "The Ken and Barbie Murders," the crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka shocked the world in the early 1990s. The Toronto pair were young, attractive suburban newlyweds. Yet in some of the most gruesome crimes in Canadian history, Homolka helped Bernardo abduct, rape, torture, and kill teenaged girls, including her own 15-year-old sister. Bernardo, moreover, was revealed to be the notorious "Scarborough Rapist" named for the Toronto suburb where he preyed for years on women. The pair's trials in 1993 became a sensation because of the nature of these crimes and ongoing controversy over the graphic videotapes made of them.

Born in 1964, Bernardo was the youngest of three children in a troubled family marked by child sexual abuse, spousal violence, stalking, and infidelity. A junior accountant by day, he was a sexual sadist by night who bound and beat his girlfriends. By the time he became involved with the 17-year-old Homolka in 1987, he had already committed two rapes at the age of twenty-three. One of three daughters in a close working-class family, Homolka worked in a veterinary clinic. Obsessed with Bernardo, she wrote him frequent love letters.

For Bernardo's part, control, more than love, explained the relationship. Amenable to his handcuffs and choking, Homolka encouraged his fantasies. Did he want to be a rapist? She approved. Bernardo became a serial rapist, lying in wait for young women to depart buses at night, brutalizing them at knife point, and later telling the details to his girlfriend. Through 1991, he raped at least twelve teenage females.

So agreeable did Bernardo find his fiancée that, two days before Christmas 1990, he persuaded her to help him rape her own younger sister, Tammy. While Homolka's family slept upstairs, he videotaped the assault as Homolka held an animal anesthetic over the girl's mouth. The girl asphyxiated, but the pair were able to portray her death as accidental.

In early 1991, Bernardo ordered Homolka to bring girls to his house for videotaped rape. She assented, and through May of 1992, three victims between the ages of 14 and 15 were abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered, their suffering captured on tape. Only after Bernardo badly beat Homolka in December of 1992 did she leave him. A few months later, DNA evidence linked him to a rape in Scarborough, and she agreed to help police. Bernardo was arrested in 1993, convicted in 1995, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Homolka, who pleaded guilty to a reduced sentence of manslaughter for her cooperation, received a twelve year sentence. Each blamed the other for the crimes.

During and after Bernardo's trial, the graphic rape videotapes became the center of an ongoing legal controversy. The Canadian government and the victims' families opposed media companies who wanted courts to unseal the evidence. In order to protect their legal interests, the victims' families went to the unusual length of copyrighting the tapes.