Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom? - Very Scary People: The Ken and Barbie Killers

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

If you enjoyed Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom, you might also like Very Scary People from ID. Listen to episode 1 here, and follow Very Scary People wherever you get your podcasts.In the late-80s and early 90s, the quaint suburbs of Toronto, Canada were blind-sided by an unprecedented flurry of violent crimes: a serial rapist on the loose and young girls vanishing… only to later discover their dead bodies, dismembered. As separate investigations developed, police across the region followed leads pointing to a young, blond-haired blue-eyed duo. Over seven episodes, host Donnie Wahlberg traces the twisted path of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka – a couple from Toronto that appeared loving and wholesome but had everybody fooled. We’ll explore how the boy and the girl next-door captivated Canada and became the killers known as “Ken and Barbie.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm your host, Donnie Walberg. From ID, this is very scary people, the Ken and Barbie killers, just ahead up before we begin. This episode contains references to sexual violence and abuse. Listen with care. It's the summer of 1991, and on the shores of Lake Ontario, love is in the air. Over 100 people are gathering in Niagara on the lake. It's a tranquil, waterfront town surrounded by sprawling fruit orchards and vineyards.

One of Canada's most beautiful places to visit. The town is a charming and pristine preserved 19th century village, not far from the city of St. Catherine's. Friends and family have come together to witness the wedding of Carla Hamolka and Paul Bernardo. They both had wonderful futures, they were gorgeous. The blonde hair, blue-eyed pair, had their whole lives ahead of them. They were young and fiercely in love. Carla, the bride to be, was 21 years old on their wedding day, and Paul was 26.

She was an animal lover with the ambitions of becoming a vet. He was a business savvy numbers guy and worked as an accountant. Carla grew up in St. Catharines, and Paul was from the neighboring town of Scarborough. That's where they first met. It was love at first sight when she met Paul Bernardo. There were a match made in heaven, and the wedding is something out of a fairy tale.

It seemed like they were the perfect couple, the Ken and Barbie, you know, the dream marriage. And just like out of the make-believe Barbie world, everything was staged perfectly. A place where Ken and Barbie can have anything they want and be anyone they want to be. And on their wedding day, Carla's dress was fit for a princess. A white wedding gown with a tightly fitted top with puffy sleeves and skirt. Her veil was peppered with baby's breath. Her six bridesmaids looked flawless too.

All of them dawned peach-colored dresses, with sleeves that puffed up to their ears. In Paul War Tuxedo, with a white bow tie that distinguished him from his five groomsmen, Carla and Paul were married by a priest. The ceremony took place in one of an agra on the legs historic churches. They pulled out all the stops. Look at their wedding. They got married in a Cinderella-like carriage and they had fesent. And this was no cheap wedding.

I mean, they really paid quite a bit of money. People were in tuxedos. They really played the part of that upper scale couple. Carla had been dreaming of a lavish wedding her whole life. Carla says, I'm going to have this big wedding. I'm going to have the horse and carriage. I'm going to have the big engagement ring. I'm going to have it all. And for a husband just like Paul, handsome and accomplished, a guy she could take home to mom and dad. Part of the reason why Amalca's parents really liked Paul Burr-Dardo is because he had a

successful career. She felt like she hit the jackpot and her friends thought so too. When her friends said you know you're the luckiest person in the world. He's such a great find. You're so lucky. The feeling was mutual. It was clear to wedding guests that Carla was also the apple of Paul's eye. Paul was always seen with his signature accessory. Paul Bernardo, you know, never was without a video camera in his hand because that was one of the things the cool things to have in, you know, the late 80s, early 90s was a video camera in his hand because that was one of the things the cool things to have in, you know, the late 80s, early 90s was a video camera. And they certainly weren't cheap. Owning your own video camera was a status symbol.

There's this home video. Paul has the camera focused on Carla. She's in a baggy t-shirt, smiling and blushing as she plops down on her bed, waving her feet in the air. There she is, ladies and gentlemen. The sexy throne world. Paul recorded everything, including every moment of their wedding. It was, you know, speeches from Paul that, you know, indicated he had found the love of his life. And the home videos from the big day documented I do's as they looked into one another's eyes. They were destined for one another it just seemed.

But while a dream was coming true at the extravagant wedding at Niagara on the lake, just miles away, a nightmare was unfolding on the shore of a neighboring lake. 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffee went missing on June 15. Two weeks later, her dismembered body parts were found encased in concrete in Lake Gibson. Leslie was last seen on the evening of June 14 in her hometown of Burlington, Ontario. She was a ninth grader at MM Robinson High School. She's 14 years old, blonde, young, vivacious. Leslie Mahaffey was, by all means, an average girl who was going kind of through a slightly

rebellious phase, so she was sneaking out of the house and smoking cigarettes, typical behavior of girls at age. And hours before she vanished, Leslie had gone to a funeral home to say goodbye to a friend who had been killed in a car crash with three other teens. After spending the night with friends, the night she disappeared, she had arrived home around two in the morning. But when she got to the front door, it was locked. She called a friend and asked to spend the night.

Her friend said she couldn't. And that was the last anyone had heard from her. Two weeks later, her body was discovered by two fishermen not far from St. Catharines, where Paul and Carla called home. On the day that Carla Himalka and Paul Bernardo get married, that's the day they discover Lesi Mahoffi's body. The two scenes taking place on June 29, 1991 couldn't be more different, but could they be

connected? And was there more to the perfect pairing of Paul Bernardo and Carla Humolka than met the eye? The overarching story is the fact that they looked like normal people. They were blonde and pretty and good-looking. How could they be so sadistic and evil? In this season we're traveling to Canada, a place known for its cold beer and warm welcomes. To trace the twisted path of Paul Bernardo and Carla Homolka, a couple from Toronto that appeared loving and wholesome. The truth is, there were anything but.

We'll explore how the boy in the girl next door became the killer's known as Ken and Barbie. This is Episode 1. Blond hair, blue eyes. When you think of Canada, crime usually isn't the first thing that comes to mind. Hockey and maple syrup may be, but not murder. Today it remains uncommon to hear a violent crime in Canada. Even in Toronto, it's most populous city.

Toronto is the capital city of the province of Ontario. It's skyline, both views of Lake Ontario, a body of water that shares its shores with New York State. The city is divided into four districts. One of them, Scarborough, is where the story begins. Much of Scarborough looks like your typical middle middle class suburbia. Tree line streets, single standing homes, strip malls, and family friendly businesses. And like most Canadian towns, Scarborough has maintained a rep for being a safe place to live.

John Rosen has dedicated his career to be a defense attorney, and he understands Canada's history with crime. So unlike the United States, Canada is a pretty safe country. For example, the city of Toronto, if we have 70 or 80 murders for a population of whatever it is, 2.7 million, that's high. And all of the towns and cities that's rounded, although it varies from place to place, are lower. In the 80s, eastern Toronto fell into the lower crime rate category. The fact of the matter is that Toronto, St. Catharines, the Burles, Scarborough, they're relatively safe places, and you could pretty well go anywhere in the city without being concerned.

This was a place where you lived in peace and comfort and safety. That was until 1987, when Scarborough felt anything but safe. Police have been tracking the movement of this serial rapist and man has targeted young women walking alone at night at various locations throughout Scarborough. A serial rapist was at large with no signs of stopping. His victim toll kept climbing. His first known attack was May 4, 1987 and his second attack was just 10 days later. Nick Pran covered the police beat at the Toronto Star when the rape started. He remembers women in their early teens to 20s being targeted.

Women were walking home late at night or getting off a bus late at night, you know, either from going home from work or seeing friends, and they were getting attacked. His victims were being grabbed from behind and dragged into bushes and driveways. Some victims were left badly injured. He stomped on her, like, her forearm and broke it. Another victim, he was a upper-thyre lower leg

that he stomped on and broke that. He would brutally beat them before ultimately raping them. He threatened to kill them and even told some that he had been stalking them prior to attacking them. It wasn't uncommon for him to make off with a victim's personal item, jewelry, identification, or clothing. He tied one woman's hand to the fence, and then you kept her like her panties as a souvenir. Local law enforcement established its own task force,

dubbed by the media as the Scarborough Rape Task Force, and later known as the Sexual Assault Squad. They began pouring resources into finding the man residents were calling the Scarborough rapist. Metropolitan Toronto police are intensifying their hunt for the man dubbed the Scarborough rapist. Late Wednesday night, the man attacked what appears to have become his sixth victim. Paul Hunter vividly remembers how community members in Scarborough felt at the time.

Nobody knew when it was going to happen next how many people were going to get raped and all anyone was thinking was what is going on here. This doesn't happen here, right? Scarborough was baby boom suburbia. It was plazas and bowling alleys and I don't think they had white picket fences but it was that kind of place. And all of a sudden there was this terror every night that someone was gonna get raped. The collective fear in Scarborough was palpable and only intensifying as police search for leads to no avail. Local women felt vulnerable and exposed to the increasingly plausible threat of being his next victor.

This was a place of safety, of refuge, from everywhere else. And that's what was so, I think, kind of stunning about the rapes, because it was happening in Scarborough, and it was happening again and again and again and again, and police seemed unable to do anything about it. Nobody, women, did not want to walk home from the bus stop. Because what if this was their night?

You know? And we all the rest of us sat helpless. What can anyone do? Except be afraid. Young women across Toronto feared for their safety in their lives. Like Kathy Kenzora. I was in college in Toronto. So I was close enough to where they were happening

that it was definitely something that I worried about and my girlfriends worried about. The threat of being attacked had women rethinking their routines and proactively adjusting the seemingly normal parts of their daily lives. I always made a habit of checking even in the back seat of my car to see if there was anyone in the car. And I started leaving like my car seat leaned forward because it was a two-door so that you knew that if your car seat was back that someone had gotten into the car. Whether or not they lived in Scarborough, they couldn't help but be affected by the news

of a serial rapist operating so close to home. So it was definitely something that I thought about, my friends thought about, and we heard about, and even though it wasn't directly in our neighborhood, it was close enough. And it permeated the media. Everyone heard about it. The Scarborough rapist became notorious for attacking his victims without revealing his face. This made the manhunt that much harder.

As his victim number increased, more information about his patterns came to light. Amy Schlossberg as a criminology professor at Fairly Dickinson University, and co-host of Women in Crime Podcast. She studies crime patterns and remembers closely looking at the details surrounding the case. patterns and remembers closely looking at the detail surrounding the case. So several young women were being raped in the area of Scarborough. And most of these rapes were occurring in open public areas, such as bus terminal, bus stops, the front yard of someone's home, the backyard of someone's home. There was one occasion where the Scarborough rapist did break into someone's home, the backyard of someone's home. There was one occasion where the Scarborough rapist

did break into someone's home and tried to assault them in their bedroom, but that was interrupted by the victim's mother. With limited identifying information, law enforcement had to make do with other details and observations to build out his profile. We're doing the best we can, hopefully. Hopefully, somebody has an idea who he is. to build out his profile. We're doing the best we can, hopefully. Hopefully. Somebody has an idea who he is.

This is Greg McCrary. He's a retired FBI agent now. But back then, he was working on a behavioral science unit when suddenly his focus changed. He was brought to Toronto to investigate the Scarborough case. There were different theories when we came up there. One of the theories was that because these victims, many of them had come from downtown or had passed through downtown Toronto on the way home, that he may be selecting the victims

downtown and jumping on a bus with them and following them to Scarborough and then getting off and raping them there. As the task force looked closer into the theory that the Scarborough rapist was only passing through, a different possibility emerged, a possibility that was far more terrifying. He might be a local, compounding the fear and panic already being felt in Scarborough If he was getting victims downtown and following them We would expect a wider dispersion of rapes and in different suburbs and different areas and even parts of Toronto That didn't happen. This was his hunting ground

But there was something the Scarborough rapist consistently did, that truly convinced FBI agents that he was local. Now the other thing with the verbal behavior that also was another indication that he lived in the area was his demand that they not look at him. Keep your head down, keep your eyes closed, don't look, don't look, don't look. It seemed he was desperate to keep his identity hidden. And while he wasn't known to show his face, a general description of his age and appearance was cobbled together by what his victims could remember.

We put his age between 18 and 25. Initially, it was thought that he was around the same age as his victims. But that wasn't really adding, as investigators looked further. When you look at the demographics of the area, we felt he had to be living in a financially dependent situation. Nobody in their late teens or early twenties could afford one of these homes in Scarborough, just isn't that going to happen.

There just really wasn't a lot to go off. A white male, young kind of blonde or brown light browned here, no accents, nothing that would indicate anything other than kind of being native to the area. Medium-build, fairly strong, you know, fit guy. It was disappointing. The police had a general idea of his demographic and the territory he moved in, and still, it seemed this serial rapist was hiding in plain sight. Jim Van Allen is a retired profiler for the Ontario Provincial Police. He worked on the case in an effort to identify the Scarborough

rapist by drawing on knowledge from experience working on cases with similar perpetrators. Profilers like Jim know what makes criminals tick and how to assess the probability of them striking again. He had his theories about the mind and method of a serial rapist. They often have this relational quality to them where they are the master and the victim is the slave. Or they are the captor and the victim is the captive. And they often lead double lives, making them even harder to track down.

They can appear like a pillar of the community or a normal individual or functioning couple in the community to people that know them superficially, but this is one of the worst scenarios for a community to experience and for police service to attempt to solve because of the predatory nature of the crime, needle and a haystack difficulty in identifying the individual. While theories and descriptions of the Scarborough rapist were rising to the surface, law enforcement weren't solving the problem. He still hadn't been caught.

Here's Nick again. I mean, they put together a 50-member task force, but what do police do in this? They round up the usual suspects, the guys who have sex assault charges, and they look at all these people. But women were still being viciously attacked. It couldn't seem to stop this. And all his, all the women he attacked was from behind. And what he would do, he would put a knife to their throat and said, if you look at me, I'll slit your throat. Frustration and concern with the state of the investigation

was mounting in Scarborough and surrounding districts. If he was right under their noses, how could it be so hard to find the guy? I think there were groups of people that just went out on their own to try to catch this guy like civilians and I there was one police officer he wasn't on the task force but he worked in the area and he had a family and a daughter and it bothered the hell out of him. That father wasn't alone. Parents all over Scarborough were up in arms over the state of the investigation. Terrified, their own daughters would be next, if the police didn't catch this guy as soon as possible.

But soon, after years of collective frustration, unrelenting attacks, and tireless attempts to track the perpetrator down, a break would finally be caught in the case of the Scarborough rapist. The Scarborough rapist-known victim toll climbed to over a dozen women by 1990. It had been three years since his first known attack, and by now, all of Canada knew of him. But although he became infamous across the country for his horrible crimes, still nobody knew what he looked like yet. Here's Paul Hunter again. His MO was to go up behind his victims and grab them from behind to make sure they couldn't see him.

He made a mistake, eventually, and somebody caught a glimpse. On the evening of May 26, 1990, the Scarborough rapist made his final attack, and a critical ground-breaking mistake. His 13th victim, a 19-year-old local woman, got a good look at him. It was a quiet, dark night. She was walking home from a bus stop when she saw a man walking towards her. He stopped to chat to the lady and he was very charming and she felt a little bit at ease, I guess, and he started walking with her.

And then they got to a dark alley, then he attacked her and raped her, but she was able to see his face. On the next episode of very scary people, the Kennen Barbie killers. After three years of a tireless investigation and widespread community panic, there's a break in the case. Having finally been seen by his last victim, she goes to the police and a composite sketch of the Scarborough rapist is drawn up based off her clear recollection of his face. She remembered his build, what he was wearing, the color of his eyes, in his hair, even how it was parted. And that's what led to the sketch, which led to a bank teller saying, Hey, that sketch looks like this guy.

The sketch was published on the front page of the Toronto star, and the bank teller wasn't the only person to recognize the man in the drawing. It wasn't long before the police started receiving more tips, pointing toward possible suspects. And a particular name kept coming up. Several people had called in tips to the police saying, this is Paul Bernardo. Very scary people. The Ken and Barbie killers as host to by me, Donnie Walberg. It's a production of ID and collaboration with Neon Hum Media, and is based on an original

series created by CNN executive producer Nancy Duffy. At CNN, our senior producer is Sabina Reiman. Our producer is Alice and O'Brien, and our associate producer isina Reiman. Our Producer is Allison O'Brien, and our Associate Producer is Michael Reyes. From ID, our Executive Producer is Jessica Lauder. From Neon Hummedia, our Executive Producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Cooper Mall is our Producer, and our Associate Producer is Zoe Cokid.

Our Editor is Stephanie Serrano. Samantha Allison is our production manager. Our fact checker is Katherine Nuhan. Josh Hahn is our mix engineer, theme and original music composed by Asha Ivanovich. You