Karla Homolka - Prison

Prison

After her 1995 testimony against Bernardo, when Homolka returned to Kingston's Prison For Women, her mother started to suffer annual breakdowns between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The collapses were severe enough that she was hospitalized, sometimes for months at a time. Homolka was moved from Kingston in the summer of 1997 to Joliette Institution (a medium security prison in Joliette, Quebec, 80 km northeast of Montreal), a facility called "Club Fed" by its critics.

Homolka appeared to thrive in a highly structured prison environment. Several psychologists and psychiatrists examined her and agreed that she showed symptoms of spousal abuse, although some believe she simulated with coaching and books.

In 1999, Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard came into possession of copies of her application to transfer to the Maison Thérèse-Casgrain, run by the Elizabeth Fry Society, and published the story noting the halfway house's proximity to local schools, hours before the Canadian courts issued a publication ban on the information. Homolka sued the government after her transfer to a Montreal halfway house was denied.

Before her imprisonment, Homolka had been evaluated by numerous psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health and court officials. Homolka, reported one, "remains something of a diagnostic mystery. Despite her ability to present herself very well, there is a moral vacuity in her which is difficult, if not impossible, to explain." As Homolka proceeded through the Canadian prison system there were frequent flashes that illuminated this perception.

In Joliette, Homolka had a sexual affair with Lynda Véronneau, who was serving time for a series of armed robberies and who reoffended so that she could be sent back to Joliette to be with Homolka, according to the Montreal Gazette. Her letters to Véronneau, wrote Christie Blatchford in her Globe and Mail column, were "in French and on the same sort of childish, puppy-dog-decorated paper she once wrote to her former husband… the same kind of girlish love notes she sent to him." Her language, Blatchford noted, was "equally juvenile".

While being evaluated in 2000, Homolka told psychiatrist Robin Menzies that she did not consider the relationship to be homosexual, as Véronneau "'saw herself as a man and planned to undergo a sex operation in due course,' the psychiatrist wrote." Psychiatrist Louis Morisette, meanwhile, noted in his report that Homolka "was ashamed of the relationship and hid it from her parents and the experts who examined her. The psychiatrist mentions in his report that under the circumstances, the relationship was not abnormal."

Again, it demonstrated Blatchford's observation that "what is particularly compelling – and telling – is how radically different are the faces she presents" to each audience. Her former veterinary clinic co-worker and friend, Wendy Lutczyn, the Toronto Sun declared, "now believes Homolka's actions were those of a psychopath, not of an abused, controlled woman". Homolka, Lutczyn said, had promised "she would explain herself", yet though the women exchanged "a series of letters while Homolka was… waiting to testify at Bernardo's trial" and after she had completed her testimony, Homolka never did try to explain to Lutczyn "why she did what she did".

On 11 January 2008, the Canadian Press reported that letters written by Homolka to Lutczyn had been pulled from eBay, where they had reached $1,600 with a week to go. Lutczyn said she did not want them any more.

In a letter of apology to her family, she continued to blame Bernardo for all her misdeeds: "He wanted me to get sleeping pills from work… threatened me and physically and emotionally abused me when I refused… I tried so hard to save her." Tim Danson, attorney for the victims' families, has said that she has never apologized to them.

Homolka took correspondence courses in sociology through nearby Queen's University which initially caused a media storm. Homolka was required to pay all fees, as well as her personal needs, from her fortnightly income of about $69, although, she told author Stephen Williams in a subsequent letter, "I did get some financial assistance". Homolka later graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Queen's. News of Homolka's self-improvement courses was greeted in the media with disdain: "Nothing has changed. Concepts of remorse, repentance, shame, responsibility and atonement have no place in the universe of Karla. Perhaps she simply lacks the moral gene," wrote another Globe columnist, Margaret Wente.

The complexities and challenges of completing behavioural studies of women who are suspected of having psychopathic traits have been noted in the forensic literature. The various different masks that the female psychopathic killer displays at different times often have more to do with the audience and the manipulation at that moment that will benefit the individual wearing the mask than the true nature of the individual wearing the mask.

Dr. Graham Glancy, a forensic psychiatrist hired by Bernardo's chief defence lawyer, John Rosen, had offered an alternative theory to explain Homolka's behaviour, noted Williams in Invisible Darkness, his first book on the case. She appears to be a classic example of hybristophilia, an individual who is sexually aroused by a partner's violent sexual behaviour, Dr. Glancy suggested."

Williams, who wrote Invisible Darkness, later reversed his opinion about her and began corresponding with her. This formed the basis for his second book, Karla – a Pact with the Devil. In her letters Homolka also disparaged a number of the professionals who had examined her and said she did not care "what conditions I would receive upon release. I would spend three hours a day standing on my head should that be required." Upon her release Homolka vigorously fought a string of conditions imposed upon her by a court (see Post-Prison, below).

Homolka participated in every treatment program recommended by prison authorities, until she was asked to participate in a program that had been designed for male sex offenders. She refused, on the grounds that she was neither male nor a convicted sex offender.

During Homolka's release hearing (under section 810.2 of the Criminal Code), Morrisette said the then-35-year-old did not represent a threat to society. Various hearings over the years have left a mixture of opinions. According to Candice Skrapec, "a fearless and much-sought-after criminal profiler", Homolka might herself be driven by malignant narcissism. If she posed any kind of danger, said Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem, a forensic psychologist for Correctional Services Canada, it lay in the ominous but not unlikely possibility of her linking up with another sexual sadist like Bernardo. "She is very attracted to this world of sexual psychopaths. It's not for nothing that she did what she did with Bernardo," he told the National Post after reviewing her file. A scheduled newspaper interview with Homolka was quashed by her lawyer. It was not just the facts of the case that shredded Homolka's cloak of victimization. Her demeanour on the witness stand had been at times "indifferent, haughty and irritable".