Invisible darkness: The strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka - Hardcover

Stephen Williams

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316941379 ISBN 13: 9780316941372

Synopsis

2014 NEW TRADE PAPERBACK EDITION - REVISED NEW LAST CHAPTER ENTITLED "ENDGAMES" "Invisible Darkness' is a masterfully written, forensically researched, minutely detailed work of true crime. As time goes by, it should be viewed as a classic of the genre." - George Elliott Clarke, Governor General Award winning poet and professor of Enblish at the University of Toronto. Paul and Karla were the perfect picture of love and youth - and they were the essence of pure evil! Invisible Darkness is not only a must read for anyone interested in law and disorder, crime and punishment: a riveting page-turner, it is the tragic story of love gone mad. Together, the Ken-and-Barbie killers kidnapped, raped and murdered three teenage schoolgirls, beginning with Karla's own sister. Expertly drawn, the book rises far above the average true crime tale, chronicling the couple's descent from love and marriage to rape and murder. It relies on voluminous research, police notebooks, medical and psychiatric records, inaccessible court documents and in-depth interviews. The author details the unbelievable series of coincidences and police and forensic lab blunders that allowed Paul and Karla to elude detection for six years. If only Bernardo’s DNA had been tested when he was first questioned as a suspect in a series of brutal rapes committed in and around the Toronto suburb where he then lived, he would have been caught before he had a chance to move to a small town minutes away from Niagara Falls and marry Karla Homolka. Together they looked to be the embodiment of the American dream: Young, well to do beautiful and in love. But the front door of their quaint pink Cape Cod -style house on the shore of Lake Ontario was a Gate to Hell. It was there they drugged and raped a half-dozen teenage girls while meticulously making videotaped records of the attacks. Everything was documented including their storybook wedding; the horse and buggy ride through picturesque Niagara-on-the-Lake to their reception and sit-down dinner for a 100 at the posh Queen's Landing Hotel as well as virtually everything they did behind their closed door. In the case of 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy they not only kidnapped, tortured and raped her, they killed and dismembered her in the basement, encased the body parts in homemade cement castings and dumped them in a local reservoir. In one of those unholy coincidences, as they exchanged vows the police were dragging the lake. A year later they kidnapped Kristen French in broad daylight while she walked home from school on Easter weekend . Before they went to Karla's parents for Sunday dinner, Karla decided that Kristen had to die. Later, they dumped her naked body on the side road next to the cemetery where Leslie was buried. The storybook wedding turned into a nightmare. Finally, the Toronto police matched Bernardo's DNA to three rape victim's in Toronto. Bernardo is now rotting away in a maximum-security prison whereas Karla has remarried and has three small children. It has to read to be believed.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in Toronto and educated at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto Stephen Williams is a writer and investigative journalist. He is also a direct descendant of Horace Greeley (on his maternal grandmother's side) who said "Go West, young man, go West" (whereupon Greeley went East and founded and for many years thereafter, edited "The New York Tribune" for whom Karl Marx was a stringer for some years). Mr. Williams began his writing career as a poet. First published at 19, he studied with Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye and Irving Layton. Shortly thereafter he got a job picking and packing books in the Toronto warehouse of Oxford University Press. After picking many cherished and rare volumes for his own library, he became a bible salesman in southwestern Ontario. Mr. Williams specialized in Oxford's Bride's Bible, the white edition. He learned everything he knows about selling from Fred Gundy. His affinity for books and bibles led him to be assigned field editor. After a stint with the publisher Holt, Rinehart, he finished his formal book-publishing career as the Editor-in-Chief of Clarke, Irwin, a now defunct privately owned once vital publishing house. Today, he lives on a farm in Southwestern Ontario, approximately 90 miles northwest of Toronto with the writer and shepherd Marsha Boulton and their English Bull Terrier, Bully Hills "Straight No-Chaser", Thelonius Monk, call name Monk!

From the Inside Flap:

"Invisible Darkness is the story of one of the more bizarre cases in recent memory--killings so sensational that they prompted the Canadian government, in the interests of justice, to silence its national press and to lock foreign journalists out of the courts.

To all appearances, Paul and Karla Bernardo had a fairytale marriage--beautiful working-class girl weds bright upper-middle-class guy and they buy a fashionable dream house in the suburbs. But, bored with his straight, prestigious accounting job, Paul soon went freelance as an international smuggler. He also revealed his boredom with conventional sex--enough so that, one Christmas Eve, he persuaded his wife to drug her own sister and engage in a menage a trois, during which the sister died (a bungling coroner ruled her death accidental).The couple then upped the ante, kidnapping and imprisoning several high school girls for sexual marathons, which they videotaped before savagely murdering their captives. When the girls' bodies were found, the police were stymied (although Paul had been accused of rape and given a DNA test that vanished for two years and only recently was linked to some fifty sexual-assault cases) until Karla tried to have her husband arrested for wife beating. During questioning, she confessed to the crimes and is now serving two concurrent twelve-year sentences for manslaughter in exchange for testifying against her husband who was jailed for life.

About this edition

• Publication date: 1709
• ISBN 10: 0316941379
• ISBN 13: 9780316941372
• Binding: Hardcover