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I believe that almost all of us, in our darkest moments, have felt angry enough to kill. We do not act on our feelings. We resolve our anger in different ways, hardly ever fulfilling those thoughts of murder and mayhem. But every so often, there are people like Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka who act on those thoughts, and take them to an extreme that most of us are unable to comprehend. Not only did they act on those thoughts, on several occasions but caught them on videotape to preserve the memories of their brutality. Like snapshots in a family album, or pressed flowers in a yearbook, these were cherished possessions that Paul and Karla viewed over and over, to relieve the evil that gave them so much pleasure. Karla has been diagnosed as a hybristophile: a person who gets sexual pleasure from the sex crimes of another person. They feed off each other, in abnormal, deviant ways. It is what happened to Karla that makes me believe this is the biggest case of injustice I have ever seen.

Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo met in November, 1987. Karla was at a convention for Vets, pet store workers and pet retail supplies, in Toronto. She and her roommate sat in the restaurant of the hotel, and when Paul and a friend wandered in, Paul stopped cold. She was young and lovely then, and Paul made a beeline for her table. He smiled his boy next door smile, and by the time the girls were ready to go upstairs, they were passionately kissing and groping each other. For several hours, they had sex, Karla fighting him to be on top, Paul wrestling her down, and her throwing a glass of ice water on him to cool him off during the course of the first night.

When Karla got home to Saint Catherine's, she was thrilled. She told anyone who would listen she met the man she was going to marry. He was perfect, in every way. While Karla was bragging to everyone about her "perfect man", Paul was in Toronto sleeping with several different girls, and raping dozens more. He took a little memento from his victims, a hairbrush, an ID card, any little thing to commemorate his deed. He stalked women coming and going from buses, and when he could, he would sneak around to look for women undressing, a habit he learned from his father, who though not his biological father, was also a sexual deviant, who molested his sister and was notorious in the neighborhood for being a peeping tom. Paul wanted to string Karla along, while continuing all his proclivities. He was beginning to develop a liking for hard core s & m movies. If the woman looked as if she were being hurt or humiliated, all the more exciting.

As Paul and Karla began to see each other, she poured her heart and soul into him. He loved to have the attention. He was working at an accounting firm and he was cultivating an image of a young suburbanite about town, well groomed, with a bright future. He needed a beautiful girl on his arm and one who he could mold into his idea of a perfect woman. Karla was young, gullible, and had few morals to get in the way of what he wanted. She would do anything to keep her fantasy man and Paul knew it. He had ideas about how to make money that didn't jibe with the field of accounting. He was to take the test to become a certified accountant, when suddenly he decided he didn’t want to work for a big company, he could make more money doing freelance work. In reality though he had failed the exam, and felt like a loser. He told everyone the freelance story and quit his job. Once unemployed, he had all the time in the world to collect pogey, and to get to the next level with Karla.

She adored all the things he did, bringing a bottle of wine for her parents, and big bunches of roses for her. She never told her friends he was showing abusive tendencies, calling her a bitch in public, and giving her instructions for self-improvement. The list was a long document, full of insulting and obsessive behavior that she would have to follow, or he was history. At first, she thought his behavior was strange, but the sexual demands in the list were a pleasure. He liked her to wear big studded dog collars, anal sex and recite a script during intercourse. “I’m your little cocksucker, your little slut, your little cunt,” she would whisper to him, as he snapped a pair of her handcuffs on her. She loved it.

One Tuesday night he drove like hell to get to her. He knocked on her basement bedroom window and frantically called her outside. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. He was panic stricken. After one of his rapes, his victim got a good look at him and police artists drew a composite. He was a dead ringer, looking so much like him that his friends gave him a hard time, and people like bank tellers and grocery clerks were looking twice. After a tip or two, the police came calling. He complied with their requests, spitting on a blotter, giving hair, and a tiny drop of his blood. He knew that it was only a matter of time until the Toronto Metro Police matched his DNA to the rapist and it was all over. Karla was a pragmatic, practical woman. She closed her eyes and looked away. If he was a rapist, so what? Karla wanted Paul and nothing could stop her. She closed her eyes and made her decision. She would stand by her man.

It took the samples two years to go through the Canadian system. If those samples had been processed quickly, possibly some of the rapes and several murders would never have happened. The lab gave murder cases priority and at the time, Paul was only one of many suspects in the rapes. It was during this time that the lab took a six-month holiday, giving Paul and Karla even more time to enact their evil.