A Toronto Star columnist nails it.....
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She won't give up without a fight. And, my God, what fight she does have behind that banal, bloodless veneer. by Rosie DiManno (with permission)
So much nerve, such gall.
If only Karla Homolka had shown an iota of this defiance when there were still lives that could have been saved, teenage girls that needed rescuing from trauma, torture and murder.
Had she but extended an ounce of the pity she is now demanding, Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy and Tammy Lynn Homolka would still be alive; other teenagers would not have been raped in a state of non-resistant stupor.
She had the power to stop Paul Bernardo from raping and killing. Instead, she lured victims for him and helped to snuff out their young lives.
Now, fearful for her own precious security, she's discovered a backbone.
A spine that was always there, along with the guile, no matter how imaginative the efforts to portray her as a helpless battered spouse, coerced into committing unspeakable crimes.
Look closely. This is the real Karla Homolka. And she hasn't changed a bit from the predator of yore.
Still the emotionally arrested juvenile at 30 years of age who signs her curlicue letters to an adoring lesbian lover: "Your love bug," "Your little kitty love" and "Your beauty." Still the unrepentant self-identified victim, "raised to be a good girl" as if this were not inconsistent with the tormenting and killing of adolescent girls who sends out lipstick kisses from her jail cell and yearns to be "f-----" by her butch-dyke paramour, a woman so enraptured with Homolka that she pleaded guilty to an old felony so that she could be returned to their prison love nest.
It is all so sickeningly familiar, a passive aggression spun into a web of lethal menace.
What's not surprising is that Homolka, now 35, has turned to the courts for
relief from the dilemma of her own notoriety.
Relief is the lawyerly way of describing an application for judicial consideration, an easing of distress, perchance a favour from the bench.
She is so very accustomed to being favoured, from the moment she became involved with the legal system, one tap dance ahead of investigators of the Scarborough Rapist, who turned out also to be the killer of schoolgirls. As was she, of course, a troublesome detail effectively muted by her exculpatory cheering section in the attorney-general's office.
And why wouldn't Homolka believe that she has a compelling case to justify the unprecedented see-no-Karla blackout she is still seeking, unwilling to take "non" for an answer, as was the decision on Wednesday by Quebec Justice Paul-Marcel Bellavance in rejecting her request for an injunction that would muzzle the media.
Such is Homolka's obstinacy that she has asked to be kept incarcerated over the long weekend she could have been liberated from prison yesterday in order to plead her case anew come Monday morning, in front of a different judge, hell-bent on an interlocutory injunction, and with a police escort. She does not, apparently, wish to make that journey to the courthouse unshielded from the baying hounds in the media.
Twelve years ago, at Homolka's one-day trial in St. Catharines, wherein she pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter in exchange for an absurdly lenient sentence, Justice Francis Kovacs imposed a publication ban stunning in its sweep and scope.
It would be two years before the public learned that Homolka was anything but unwilling or pummelled into submission, a co-conspirator who helped her former husband snatch girls, truss and torture them, murder them, dispose of them.
Kovacs's ban was made, ostensibly, to ensure that Bernardo would receive a fair trial, a trial at which Homolka was the Crown's star witness if rendered largely redundant by the belated emergence of the couple's homemade videotapes, which depicted all the grotesqueries inflicted on their hostages. But those were also two years of grace for Homolka and two years of cover for the justice bureaucrats, who had crafted that infamous plea bargain with a demonstrable liar, a deal revealed in all its jaw-dropping accommodation only at a safe remove from its execution.
From the outset, Homolka has been encouraged in her view of herself as a victim equal to the slain girls, a preposterous construct fortified by a slew of psychiatrists hired by some of the very people who needed to further that image. When the landscape began to shift, Homolka considered herself betrayed. She'd gambled on four years behind bars, been a model inmate, but ended up serving the full twelve-pack anyway, with a list of release restrictions to boot.
Now oh, the irony the predator seeks protection from the chase, a judicial buffer to safeguard her existence such that the media would be proscribed from reporting her whereabouts or anything else about a life resumed. It is, as always, about her: her rights, her preferences, her demands.
"As far as I know, nothing has been done to safeguard my security after my release from prison," Homolka stated in her original affidavit. "(T)he thought of being relentlessly pursued, hunted down and followed when I won't have any protection makes me fear for my life."
If Homolka had two brain cells to rub together, she would hold a press conference outside prison, feed the beast, and move on.
But she wants what she didn't have the heart to give: Mercy and a life safe from harm.
