Original subtitles

You know, even to this day, the word tape has an effect on me.

I'm right back there.

I'm sitting there and I'm watching.

It's just a trigger.

It's the most powerful thing that I've ever experienced in my life.

It was horrendous.

It was horrible. Horrible.

It's unimaginable what I viewed.

This is the most difficult because it's my little sister. Paul approached me,

and I'm wanting...

The videotapes showed Carla's participation in not only the

sexual assault of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffey, but in the

ultimate death of her own sister.

When we found out Carla's sister Tammy had passed away, the last thing on our

minds was that she was murdered.

When you're asked to pose your sister as a Christmas gift, that's unforgivable.

And it was absolutely shocking that one sister

could betray another sister.

Their own blood relation in such a way.

Carla, she's not going to be a battered woman anymore.

She's going to be a perpetrator.

Niagara Regional Police say they were thorough, did everything save demolish

whole house.

Right after the police had exhausted their search warrant of 57 Bayview,

Bernardo gave a little map to defence lawyer Ken Murray and his colleagues

as to where to go in the house.

And lo and behold, out came the videotapes that 71 days of a police

failed to locate.

So at this point, only the defense lawyers, Ken Murray and his colleagues,

these tapes.

They had something enormous in this enormous case.

It was a seismic event for the defense to have these tapes.

These six tapes show Paul Bernardo and Carla Hamalka raping and torturing

Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffey.

And also, on the tapes, was the drugging and the sexual assault of her sister,

Tammy.

In every encounter,

At some point, Carla becomes an active participant.

And at some point, she actually orchestrates things.

Completely undercuts this notion that she was so afraid of Paul, she's

quivering in the corner.

There's absolutely no hint, not a hint, that she's reluctant, that she's

passive.

Focusing on Carla.

At this point, without having found the tapes, the police are trying to assemble

a case to charge Bernardo with the murders of Kristen French and Leslie

Mahaffey.

Here's my husband.

That case depended entirely on Carla Homolka testifying as a credible witness

against her husband.

You've basically got a steamroller.

The entire police effort is heading toward that Bernardo trial, and Carla is

their witness.

28 -year -old Paul Bernardo is in protective custody at the Metro East

Center. His lawyer, Kenneth Murray, met with Bernardo for more than an hour this

afternoon. But now, Ken Murray...

has this extraordinary explosive new information to impeach Carla's

Once Bernardo's lawyer, Ken Murray, watches the tapes, he could develop a

defense strategy because now he saw Carla's complicity. So the entire

of defense was basically dependent on her to deflect attention from his client

and say, look at Carla. Now we see who she really is. It's not the Carla.

In the initial statement, it's the car along the videotape, and that's not a

person to be believed.

But Ken Murray then makes a decision to adopt a fairly bizarre and unusual

strategy about what to do with the tapes.

So in his inexperience, he comes up with this brilliant idea that he's going to

just conceal the tapes.

And he's going to conceal them so nobody knows he has them.

Ken Murray knew he had his ace of spades.

He had the tapes. The police didn't. And when it gets to trial, and Carla's on

the witness stand, out will come the tapes, and she is devastated as a

in the prosecution of Paul Bernardo.

It'd be front -page news. The entire world who was watching this case would

know, what a clever lawyer.

That he has all this ammunition to damage the credibility of the major

And man, he was smart by concealing it.

Here's the problem for Ken Murray.

There's absolutely no rule in Canadian law, British law, or American law that

allows lawyers to conceal physical evidence.

Physical evidence has to be turned over at some point.

Instead, Mr. Murray decides, I can hold on to these. No one needs to know I have

them. And boy, is it going to be a spectacle in court when I spring this.

He really felt his glory would come.

Bernardo was supposed to appear in a St. Catharines court today to be formally

charged with the murders of 15 -year -old Kristen French and 14 -year -old

Leslie Mahaffey. But Niagara Regional Police decided to defer those charges

indefinitely and offered no explanation why.

At this point, the police didn't have the tape, but they had Carla.

So they're still taking their time trying to build up the credibility of

star witness.

There's a really high -level game of chess going on between Carla and the

police.

She wants to know if they've found the tape.

And without having found the tape, the police have little choice but to believe

the account Carla's giving them.

So Carla was constructing a narrative that the police and prosecutors

were only too willing to accept.

If you're going to get Bernardo and you've got this person over here who is

battered woman who's willing to deliver him up to you, you're going to grab at

it.

So up to that point... Carla Malka was claiming that my husband, Paul Bernardo,

is the murderer and abductor of Kristen Frentz and Leslie Mahaffey.

Carla then told the police that the assaults on Kristen and

Leslie had actually been videotaped.

Having told them about the tapes, Carla was in a position where she perhaps...

had to be a little bit more forthcoming about what was on the tapes and the off

chance that the police actually found these videotapes.

And so to stay ahead of that incrimination, he realizes that

she has to kind of offer up some information on it.

What did they say? Get ahead of the narrative.

Get ahead of the story.

Tell her version of it before they find it.

So Carla told the police. I was forced by him to participate to some

degree in what happened to them. He made me have sex with them. So I can help

you, you know, with nailing the bastard.

I never should have gotten to know Kristen because you get emotionally

with these people, and it really hurts.

It hurts a lot more because I felt like I was friends with both of them,

especially Kristen, because we did so much stuff together. We put makeup on

together. We talked, you know, just girls talking when Paul was gone getting

food, and it just made it hurt even more.

So in the way Carla reported this to the police at the time, she distanced

herself from any kind of culpability in what happened to Kristen French by

making sure they understood that she tried to befriend her, that they

hung out and put on makeup with one another, as

if they were in some sort of slumber party kind of parallel universe to what

happening to Kristen with Paul.

Carla is not telling the truth.

She's thought to be in the top two percentile in IQ.

So it is not a stretch for Carla to learn what to say, to

adopt other narratives and pull them into hers.

Without having found the tape, the police have nothing else besides her as

evidence.

On these videotapes that the Crown haven't seen, we call prosecutors the

It's not just Mahaffey in French. There's also the death of her sister,

And so Carla.

Knowing this is on the tapes, because she was present when the filming was

done, realizes she needs to preemptively address this issue because she did not

reveal to the police in her first statement that there was any wrongdoing

committed vis -a -vis her sister.

So the police at this point would have had no actual awareness of the death

of... Carla's sister, Tammy, being significant in any way.

That was a tragedy in the family.

This is Christmas 1990, everybody!

They're all drinking for the Christmas festivities.

Are you in the Christmas tune? That's all I want to know.

I remember Carla saying to me that herself, Paul, and

Tammy were in the rec room and the kind of drink they were having, but her

sister never tried anything like that and really wanted to try it.

So she had one, and then she had another one.

Later, I'd find out from Paul.

She had thrown up and then choked on her vomit.

It was such a sudden death.

We just chalked it up to a tragic accident.

Carla explains that she was so persistent that

she felt, what the hell, let's just let it happen.

We'll let it happen once. It'll never bother me again.

And so she begins to spill the beans on

The fact that Paul Bernardo forced her against her will to provide halothane

from the veterinary clinic in huge doses and drug her sister into

unconsciousness in the family rec room.

The only chemical that was near her was the halothane.

It was not placed on her face directly.

It was held, as I said, like this, this far away.

When you actually see Tammy being drugged and sexually assaulted on the

tape, Carla didn't just hold the halothane rag

away from Tammy's face. She actually applied it to her face.

As a veterinary office assistant, you would know that it's a potentially

chemical. And for her to put it and apply it to Tammy's face was...

That's pretty close to murder.

Yeah, I put some halothane on a cloth and I held it near her face.

And Paul raised her. He had... Vaginal intercourse with her and anal

with her. And then she grew up. Like, she stopped breathing then.

One of the things on the tapes was Paul demanding that Carla perform

cunnilingus. on Tammy, who's unconscious, and she does.

You're not going to find that in her revelations to the police because that

not cast her in a very good light, but that's clear on the tape.

The police reaction to Carla Homolka was to feel that she was really stepping

forward as a witness, that she was really coming clean, she was telling

much as she knew, and so she would be a good witness on the stand.

Whether or not the police ever sort of second -guessed themselves and thought,

wait a minute, what's going on here? A 20 -year -old is offering her 15 -year

-old sister to her boyfriend to be raped?

We don't know.

They've never articulated precisely what they were thinking about this.

She's living at her parents' home.

Her parents are sleeping upstairs You could not be a safer environment to tell

your psychotic boyfriend get the fuck out of my house This is not happening in

my house under my watch

By

now Carla has to be feeling more and more at ease Because she would assume

there's going to be some hint, at least, if they found the tape.

It's going to be clear from their questions.

So she's probably becoming pretty relaxed, all considered,

about the probability the tapes have not been found.

And so that puts Carla in the position where now she's really got leverage.

Something else creeps into her demeanor, and that's her sense of being at home

with this whole situation.

Suddenly, she's not behaving like a good but victimized person.

She's sociopathic.

Carla Homolka had actually demanded the death of Kristen French.

because she wanted to go and have Easter Sunday supper with her family.

I said, well, we have to go to my parents for Easter dinner.

He said, well, why don't we just not go?

And I said, well, how is it going to look if this girl is missing and we have

alibi? We haven't gone anywhere.

We haven't done anything.

And he said, well, I guess you're right.

You can't even get your mind around what kind of sociopathy that entails.

And he wanted to keep her for longer, and I didn't want to. I was going to

I didn't want to go to work knowing that this girl was in the house and she

could escape so easily, and I didn't.

I was afraid.

So I didn't suggest to him that we kill her on Sunday, but I knew that she...

I knew that she had to be gone.

Now you tell me, how is that consistent with a diagnosis of vulnerability from

battered wife syndrome and PTSD?

Nonsense. I mean, how can you watch that and then believe anything she has to

say?

It's such a jarring admission.

But I just think they saw her as a star witness that came to them and gave them

this information. And, you know, to the extent that she had any complicity, they

could just get that out of the way and get on to the main show.

She played them. She played the police.

And she's a manipulative person, and she knew they needed her desperately so she

could serve them up a story that they would eat.

take hook, line, and sinker because they needed her.

I don't think they had an awful lot of other concrete evidence.

And so the biggest evidence they had was Carla Homolka.

You have to keep in mind, the fundamental thing, important thing, is

monster off the street.

So I think a case can be made that if the only way they could do that was to

negotiate testimony from Carla to get that monster off the street, then

that's worth it.

They were given some assistance from Carla to sort of look for physical

in the interior of the house.

They have Carla do a walkthrough with them, which is an extraordinary video to

watch.

Frankly,

it's mind -boggling.

Carla deliberately dresses up like a schoolgirl.

As if to say to the police, hey, I'm just another victim too, like these poor

schoolgirls, Leslie and Kristen.

Can you answer the question, sir?

Was any of the furniture damaged as a result of the investigation?

Not that I'm aware of, no.

It's astonishing that a woman who's walking through a house where people

been killed and sexually assaulted still has the audacity to ask where her

furniture is.

The extraordinary detachment that Hamalka showed around all of this stuff,

know, there was a real element of banality of evil with her.

She

couldn't

even find her way to the place where you pretend empathy properly.

Couldn't get there.

The more she has police and psychiatrists and therapists not knowing

what's on the tapes, saying, oh my God, look what you've been through. Her

family is believing that she's been beaten time and time again by Bernardo.

She's reading all this literature about battered women. And Carla starts

to become...

a creature of all that information.

She takes it in, and in her

chameleon -like way, begins to view herself as a victim, as the battered

woman.

While the prosecution continues to question Carla, Paul Bernardo's lawyers

still holding on to the tapes that completely shatter the illusion that

an unwilling victim.

Yet the Crown don't know that.

And they never found the videotape, which were in some light fixture.

Their entire prosecution against Bernardo revolves around her testimony.

And so they needed to play nice with Carla because she was the only

source they had.

And so they end up making a plea bargain deal with her behind closed doors.

It will become one of the most controversial plea agreements in

history, known as a deal with the devil.

And the police and the Crown, they didn't have the tape.

If they had found the tape...

there would have been no deal with Carla Homolka.

The deal is, if she pleads guilty to two counts of manslaughter of Leslie and

Kristen, she will get a lenient sentence for whatever involvement she may have

had, and in exchange, Carla will now be the primary crown witness against Paul

Bernardo.

Ultimately, the deal, you know, was...

Five years for each of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffey and then an

additional two years for the death of her sister.

Twelve years.

Got elevated from ten to twelve.

The price of Tammy's life was two years.

and she will be eligible for parole in four years.

It really is an extraordinary idea that somebody that was involved in that

degree of murderous depravity could have been serving no more than a four -year

sentence.

The next time we expect to see her is taking the stand as the star witness in

the murder trial of Paul Bernardo.

Ramalka got a very, very light sentence by pulling the wool over everybody's

eyes.

And at the very last minute, there is an agreement made that there will

be a publication ban around Carla's plea deal and her involvement in this

case.

Good evening, gag order.

Canadians anxiously awaiting details were shocked when the judge announced

would be a news blackout.

Under the publication ban, the only thing that can be reported by the

media is Carla's sentence, but not the reason.

All I'm legally allowed to tell you is Carla Homolka was convicted of

manslaughter and she got 12 years in jail.

If we tell you anything more than that, we're breaking the law.

If we thought that there was a way of publishing information that would be

legal, we'd do it. The government says it's watching closely.

Every single instance that's reported or noticed by us will be investigated, and

if the case arises and charges are laid, then they'll be prosecuted.

The government was dreadfully worried that if all the information came out

this... plea bargain arrangement bernardo would not be able to get a fair

so that's why we do publication bans the cynical people will say the publication

ban was to protect the various architects of the deal because if all

were all revealed there would be an outcry what we didn't know was what was

carla's role had she gotten away with murder by getting this deal

We've all been living it for the last year and a half. They asked the public

help to find her. They asked the public for help when they showed their movie.

They've asked the public to call in tips. How can they ask the public now

know?

So the public has no information, just all this innuendo and rumor.

One of the things that starts to happen in this case is Ken Murray, Bernard's

lawyer, starts to speak a little bit obliquely to...

public officials and media about Carla. They're doing everything they can to

protect Carla Bernardo.

I said before that the Crown may have made a deal with the devil.

I didn't think it would go quite this far.

People really didn't know what her story was.

That's the way the Crown prosecutors wanted the trial to proceed.

But that shows how desperate they were to make sure that at the end of this

trial, Paul Bernardo would have first -degree murder convictions, not second

-degree, not manslaughter.

First degree.

First degree murder among the charges faced tonight by Paul Bernardo and the

French in Mahaffey Killings.

Niagara Police finally laying the charges after months of investigations.

Paul Bernardo has been charged with two counts of first degree murder, two

counts of unlawful confinement, two counts of kidnapping.

two counts of aggravated sexual assault, and one count of causing an indignity

to a human body in reference to Leslie Maher.

Although murder charges have been laid against Paul Bernardo, his scheduled

trial faces further delays after surprise development.

Paul Bernardo's murder hate took another twist, another maneuver shrouded in

mystery. When Bernardo's lawyer, Ken Murray, applied to be taken off the

Mr. Murray, will we find out today why you went off the case?

The reasons can't be made public, so it can't be reported whether Murray quit or

Bernardo fired him.

Ken Murray took himself off the case after he consulted with

legal authorities.

and his governing body, and he was told the tapes need to be handed over to

another lawyer because he had withheld the

tape.

Ken Murray ended up holding on to these tapes for, I believe, it was 15 months,

just sitting on this evidence, which no one knew existed except for a couple

lawyers who had viewed the tape.

It all adds up to another bizarre turn in an already twisted tale.

This is really one of the sort of stranger parts of this case about how

lawyer can find tapes that the police couldn't find after 71 days and then

thinks it's appropriate to sit on this bombshell for over a year. It's

astonishing. It still blows my mind.

Murray had held back these tapes.

in order to use them to impeach Carla's credibility at Bernardo's trial.

Right away.

If he'd gone and handed them to the police, that likely would have been the

of Carla's deal.

It's hard to put that thought aside and just say, well, Ken Murray, you did your

best for your client.

Prominent defense lawyer John Rosen is Bernardo's new counsel.

Mr. Murray is discharged and I'm taking possession of the file.

So, they go to John Rosen, which seems like a likely choice because John's

nickname is Mr. Murder.

Because, for better or worse, he's probably done more murder cases than

in Canada.

Bernardo's new lawyer was asked if this latest development is anything more than

a delaying tactic.

Absolutely not. Mr. Bernardo has absolutely nothing to do with this. This

his fault at all.

And yes, he's tired of waiting around a first trial.

Murray deposits the tapes with John because that's what he had to do. He

had no choice.

My name is John Rosen, and I'm a criminal lawyer.

So when the mini cassettes came out of the envelope,

what was depicted was these two young

girls, Leslie and Kristen, who had obviously been abducted and held hostage

in this house, were sexually molested. And it doesn't matter how many.

horrible cases I've been involved in. This was quite personal, if you will,

because you actually can see it happening.

I had tears in my eyes. I stood up, I walked out, I went into the bathroom,

a bit of a cry. I threw water on my face, pulled myself together, came out

said, okay, let's get to work.

I mean, that was the only way to deal with it.

So I had to go and see the client, and I had to say to the client, I am going to

give these to the police regardless.

The tapes went to the police and the rest is history.

This is a huge, pivotal moment in the case.

17 months after the tapes are found, They've only got a few months to go

Bernardo stands trial.

The police and prosecutors are now seeing those tapes for the first time.

Just imagine how they suddenly feel about their star witness.

Here are these tapes showing who Carla really was.

and what her role really was.

They are no longer seeing Homolka as a battered woman, as a victim, as

someone who had no free will. She was a manipulator and a co

-conspirator.

What was so blatant once they actually started to watch the videotapes was the

lie that Carla Homolka had offered them before the plea bargain.

Carla did not tell the truth to the police. She held back on her role in the

Tammy death.

She held back on the assault of Kristen and Leslie.

But there's one more thing the police discover on those tapes.

And it could be the biggest lie of all.

And it could be the most damaging to Carla's credibility as a witness at the

forthcoming Bernardo trial.

The real hidden explosive device was a whole segment

which Carla had not told the police about where she and Paul

sexually assault a girl who has been drugged into unconsciousness and it's

Tammy.

It's the girl we call Jane Doe.

Carla didn't mention that when she was negotiating her deal.

Later, when the police start looking into the circumstances around Jane Doe's

assault, it's a very fortunate situation that she didn't die.

What they discover is the whole thing was Carla's doing.

She brought Jane Doe to the house. Jane Doe was her friend.

How can you believe anything about Carla's innocence and victimhood when

takes one of the only people she's friends with and on her own tranquilizes

woman before Paul returns?

Those are the facts.

Extreme close -up. Whoa!

Whoa!

And there's this incredibly powerful image.

of Carla Homolka having assaulted Jane Doe, looking up into the camera, and the

eyes are just right out of a Hollywood horror film.

I mean, they were dead.

Absolutely dead.

There was no life in those eyes.

That's disturbing.

So the prosecution are in one hell of a quandary.

The trial is coming at them like a freight train. They're in final

And now here are these tapes showing who Carla really was.

So the question is, are they going to rip up the deal? How can they not rip up

the deal?

So the predicament presented to the prosecution, do they charge Carla with

sexual assault, for example, or administering a noxious substance or

unlawful confinement or all of that?

And by laying the charge, they would have damaged their own witness.

Do they do nothing? They still need her to testify?

What did they do?

That was the dilemma they were in.

So the challenge presented by the tapes actually was they didn't have visual

evidence of the actual murder of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffey. And so the

police wanting to charge Paul Bernardo with first degree murder.

were still heavily reliant upon Carla Hamalka as their star witness because

had no physical evidence, and now they realize they also didn't have any visual

evidence of his actual involvement in those murders.

Without Carla Hamalka's testimony, they would have had to drop those murder

charges.

They could charge him with a sexual assault, but they couldn't charge him

first -degree murder without Carla.

When it comes to the first -degree murder charges, all they have are the

that come out of Carla's mouth. Paul Bernardo will be convicted based on

Hamalka's testimony, her eyewitness testimony, her direct evidence. They

nothing else. They're in a desperate situation if they want to obtain a

conviction for first -degree murder.

So what do the prosecution choose to do?

Of course they choose to continue with Carla as their star witness.

That is not a criminal justice system that deserves respect.

You ask me how it happened? I don't know.

I'm part of this profession and I don't know. Everything about this cast the

administration of justice into disrepute.

Everything about this case stinks.

So now the focus became, how do we explain away?

her conduct as seen on the tape. Everybody knew that the only way you

rehabilitate her as a witness was to ensure that she could be labeled as a

victim. What to do? What to do?

Well, let's whitewash her further.

So the Crown, they went all the way to California to get psychiatrist Dr.

Hatcher.

Suddenly it emerges that she suffers from some sort of trauma that led to

loss and amnesia.

So that's the way they legitimate her role as a crown witness because she

clearly was traumatized and has no recollection of the Jane Doe sex

So she never lied to the police.

Now they had an explanation for why she didn't necessarily tell them everything

she should have known because she suffered amnesia from post -traumatic

disorder.

I'm an expert in deviant sexual behavior and sexually motivated homicide.

And I got approached by Paul Bernardo's defense about...

Would I assist them and look at the videotapes?

Once I saw the

videotapes and was fully informed about what actually went on, it was quite

clear to me that this was a lethal couple.

Dr. Hatcher from California was an expert in battered woman syndrome, and

of his opinion would have been trauma and dissociative amnesia. So that theme

what he followed.

If you looked at the videotapes,

I didn't see anything in the videotapes if I had to testify that...

would point to her being in a dissociative amnesic state.

Clinically, it just didn't make sense.

How the hell does she remember intricate details of Mahaffey in French,

yet she's so traumatized she can't remember Jane Doe, which in fact, the

are, she brought Jane Doe to the home without Paul's prompting.

This is one of her worst crimes because she's the one taking initiative.

So it's very convenient she doesn't remember.

The real question now is, will the jury buy this story?

Randy, you're in position.

The entire trial of Paul Bernardo has been building up to this day.

The accused and an accuser, face to face in courtroom 6 -1.

I'm sorry, the courtroom is full.

You could have heard a pin drop in the whole courtroom.

Nobody moved.

And she was worse than the proverbial deer caught in the headlights.