Authors: Tammy Cohen
‘She screamed and fought – I’m shaking so much.’
Rebecca wanted reassurance. She wanted to know Stephen was pleased with her, that all she’d been through and all she’d risked had been worth it because it had won her his approval and his love. She wasn’t disappointed.
From his friend’s house, where he’d sat up playing computer games after coming back from the pub, making sure his alibi stuck, Stephen Marsh sent her a congratulatory text message: ‘You’re a star,’ he wrote. ‘I love you.’
In the master bedroom at 25 Howard’s Way, where Jaspal Marsh lay immobile in a pool of blood on the floor, her mobile phone beeped unheard. There was a message coming in, adding to the already crowded inbox.
‘Can’t believe you haven’t called me,’ Stephen Marsh had written. ‘Love you.’
The following morning, Rebecca was still shaking, although in her mind, she was already distancing herself from what she’d
done. Up by six in the morning, she’d completed three loads of washing by the time her husband woke up, but she still couldn’t shake off the feeling of being unclean, soiled.
‘Everything will be OK now,’ she told herself firmly, lighting yet another cigarette, although normally she rarely smoked. ‘Stephen and I will be together. I’ve done everything he asked; I’ve proved myself to him.’
She kept thinking of the message he’d sent her. He’d be so proud of her for putting their future first. She couldn’t wait to see him. Everything would fall into place as soon as they were together again.
But when she drove to pick him up for work as they’d arranged, it was a different story. Rather than throwing his arms around her and comforting her, as she’d hoped he would, Stephen was standoffish, distant even. Rebecca couldn’t understand it. He’d come straight from his friend’s house without going home so it wasn’t as if he was in shock from seeing his wife’s body. She just didn’t get why he was being so cold – after all she’d done, all she’d been through… Of course she wasn’t expecting them to be together right away. She knew there’d be a difficult period while he arranged the funeral and everything. All she wanted was a bit of warmth and understanding to wipe the image of Jaspal Marsh’s glazed, unseeing eyes from her head.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, miserably, as her passenger sat staring at the road ahead, his hands in his lap.
Stephen shrugged unresponsively, refusing to meet her gaze.
‘Talk to me,’ she begged.
But he wasn’t in the mood for talking. Nor did he return the pressure when she tried to hold his hand, or lean over to kiss her deeply as he’d always done before. When he finally did turn to face her, it was as if someone had switched off the love in his eyes, leaving them shuttered and illegible.
‘I’ll see you later then,’ he said. And then he was gone.
Once again, Rebecca Harris was left alone with her thoughts and her memories, and the glassy-eyed ghost she was trying so hard to keep at bay. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
That whole day, she tried to concentrate on her work, but she was like an automaton as she answered calls. She was OK as long as she concentrated on the caller and the question, but every now and then a wave of shock would come over her as she remembered what she’d done. Looking round her, she wondered how it could possibly be real. Everything else was so normal – the staff, the phones, even the potted plants. How could the world just potter on as if it were just an ordinary day when something so earth shattering had happened? Wouldn’t it all be different? Wouldn’t you be able to tell?
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked Stephen, when he got in the car at the end of the day, ready for a lift home. Again, he wouldn’t meet her eyes; again, he just brushed off the question, unwilling to enter into conversation.
He was just in shock, like she was, she told herself. And he was probably steeling himself for what would happen when he went home.
Driving towards Gorseinon, Rebecca’s hands clutched the
steering wheel tightly. These were the same roads she’d driven down just the night before, and yet it seemed like a lifetime ago. Now the woman who’d sat behind the wheel while her lover bombarded her with texts, who’d had the option to pull out any time she liked and hadn’t appreciated what a luxury that was, seemed like a different person.
Rebecca was fast realising just how much she’d lost. Dropping Stephen off near his home, she felt an overwhelming urge to grab onto him and not let go. She would force him to tell her he still loved her, to reassure her that everything was going to be just as he’d promised. She couldn’t bear the blankness in his expression. He was looking at her as though she was nothing to him, as if she was worse than nothing. Didn’t he realise how much she’d done for him, for them?
As she watched him walk away from the car in the direction of his home, once again Rebecca felt that crushing weight in her stomach as an agonising thought occurred to her. Might this be the last time she’d ever see him? Had it all been for nothing?
Back home with Ron and her little boy, Rebecca was taciturn and even more irritable than normal. She didn’t want to talk to her husband; she didn’t want to play at being a fun, happy mummy. All she wanted to do was sit with her mobile phone in her hand, waiting for news from Stephen.
Would the police have fallen for his story about a burglary gone wrong? Had she been seen leaving the house? She wanted to call him so badly, but she didn’t dare in case the police were there with him.
By now it was starting to sink in just how huge a thing she’d just done. Sure, she’d made mistakes in her life before – marrying Ron had been one of them – but never any that she couldn’t put right again. Slowly she was beginning to realise that this weight she’d been carrying around inside her for the last few weeks, and the panic washing over her in waves since the previous night were now with her for life.
What the hell had she done?
By the next morning, she was a nervous wreck. When the police rang the door bell, wanting to talk to her about the mysterious death of her lover’s wife she hardly had the energy to act surprised.
‘I went straight home after the work party,’ she told them, weakly. ‘I’ve no idea what happened to her.’
But the police, unsurprisingly, simply weren’t buying it, particularly when they scrutinised CCTV footage from Friday night in Swansea City Centre and saw Rebecca’s car heading in the opposite direction to the one she’d described.
When they came back to Rebecca’s house on the Monday after the murder, it was with a warrant for her arrest.
On 2 April 2007, after just two and a half hours, the jury of eight women and four men announced to a packed Swansea Crown Court that they had reached a unanimous verdict in the case of Stephen Marsh.
Over the past seventeen days, the twelve jurors had heard evidence from Rebecca Harris describing how she’d murdered Jaspal Marsh while acting on direct instructions from the victim’s
husband. They’d heard from police who had a record of the large volume of texts between Rebecca and Stephen on the night of the murder. They’d heard from Stephen’s girlfriends, one of whom claimed to have talked to him about murdering his wife. And they’d viewed shocking footage from Stephen’s mobile phone of Rebecca Harris writhing on a bed while being sliced with a knife.
On the other hand, they’d also heard Stephen express his deep, abiding love for murdered Jaspal. ‘She was going to be my wife forever,’ he’d told the court, assembling his handsome features into an appropriate expression for a grieving widower. He’d always managed to get women to agree to anything he asked. Now, with a jury where women outnumbered men two to one, he was putting his charm to the ultimate test.
Rebecca Harris and the other women had been silly mistakes, he confessed, holding his hands up like a naughty boy caught smoking behind the bike shed. They hadn’t meant anything. In fact, he had ‘no opinion’ of Rebecca now and was trying to block her out of his mind.
The jury also heard Stephen blame alcohol for the ‘catastrophic memory loss’ that caused him to blank out the texts he’d received from Rebecca Harris on the night of the murder. As for those he’d sent her, well, she’d just misinterpreted them.
Stephen Marsh held up his hands to being an alcoholic, he admitted being a womaniser with a penchant for very rough sex, but he flat-out denied being a murderer.
Whatever way the verdict went, it was all over for Rebecca Harris. Already she had confessed to murdering Jaspal and she
knew she was going to prison for a very long time. She’d done it all for love, only to have the man of her dreams throw her to the lions in the most public and humiliating way.
She wanted revenge. And when the jury returned its verdict on Stephen Marsh, she got it.
‘Guilty!’
In May 2007, Rebecca Harris and Stephen Marsh were back in court to be sentenced for the murder of Jaspal Marsh. Stephen Marsh, who’d tried so hard to wriggle out of any blame, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for masterminding the murder, while Rebecca Harris received twelve years for carrying it out.
Anyone in court during that trial would be left with one abiding, haunting image - of a woman, tied to a bed while a knife sliced through her flesh.
A relationship rooted in power and in pain carries within it from the start the seed of its own self-destruction. Unfortunately, in the case of Stephen Marsh and Rebecca Harris, it was someone else who would eventually pay the ultimate price for a twisted desire, gone out of control.
F
licking back her long blonde hair, Karla Homolka flashed a wide, exuberant smile at the video camera, showing a row of even teeth as white as the polo-necked sweater she was wearing to keep out the winter chill.
It was 23 December 1990 and the kind of night in this part of Canada where your breath seemed to freeze before it even left your mouth, as you scurried between your front door and car, hoping against hope that the lock wouldn’t be frozen shut, forcing you to spend more agonising minutes outdoors, your skin flayed raw by the biting wind.
However, inside the Homolkas’ chaotic four-storey home on 61 Dundonald Street in the St Catherine’s area of Ontario, just a few miles from the border with North America, the heating was cranked up to the max and pretty, curvy Karla was
determined not to let the bleak weather affect what was shaping up to be a fantastic Christmas.
The whole Homolka clan was downstairs in the den, watching the TV, taking silly footage on the video camera, enjoying a few drinks and generally doing what most families do when it’s two days before Christmas and too cold to go anywhere.
The three blonde Homolka girls – Karla, 20, Lori, 19, and Tammy, 15 – were in typically high spirits, but Karla was on particularly good form. She’d always loved Christmas: it appealed to the part of her nature that would always stay a little girl; that still loved cuddly toys and heart-shaped stickers and posters of cute baby animals. But this Christmas was going to be more special than ever and the reason for that was lounging on the den floor, shaking with laughter as he tried to keep the video camera steady: her boyfriend and soul mate, 26-year-old Paul Bernardo.
Even now, three years after their first meeting, Karla sometimes still couldn’t believe her luck in having found Paul. Like many girls she’d grown up dreaming of the prince who’d whisk her off to a fairytale wedding and now here he was, her very own prince – only more handsome and more charismatic than she’d ever dared imagine. Over 6ft, with piercing blue eyes and light brown hair that fell rakishy over his forehead, Paul Bernardo was everything she wanted.
‘Our relationship gets better each day,’ Karla gushed a few months earlier in a letter to a girlfriend. ‘He’s going to make the perfect husband. It looks like all my dreams are coming true,
especially the one about finding the best man in the whole world to marry!’
And now she was going to prove to Paul just how much he meant to her. Surveying the cosy family scene, with the Christmas tree in the corner of the room and her sisters and parents and Paul laughing and joking, Karla hugged her mounting nervous excitement to herself. Tonight she was going to give her beloved Paul the best present ever, the one he’d been asking and begging for, but almost given up hope of ever getting.
But the clean-cut, handsome accountant’s dearest desire wasn’t, as you might guess, a new suit to add to his collection of sharp work-wear, nor the latest album from one of his favourite rappers. What Paul Bernardo most wanted for Christmas, and what his devoted petite girlfriend with the big smile was determined to give him in just a few hours was 15-year-old Tammy Homolka, drugged unconscious and ready to be raped.
Dorothy and Karel Homolka had always had high hopes for their oldest daughter. Strikingly attractive and academically bright, Karla had the potential to be whatever she wanted to be. And if they were disappointed when she shelved any thought of college to work full time in a local vet’s clinic, they weren’t about to lose sleep over it. It was still a good job, and to a couple who’d started their married life living in trailer parks, anything that brought in a regular paycheck and offered opportunities for advancement was a step in the right direction.
The Homolkas were thrilled the first time Karla brought her
new boyfriend home. Well-spoken, with a ready smile and a promising career at one of the country’s best known accountancy firms, Paul Bernardo was everything they could have hoped for. Of course, when the young couple described how they’d met in Toronto, where Karla was at a pet-industry convention and Paul was out on the town with a buddy, they left out the bit where they’d gone directly back to Karla’s hotel and had noisy sex for hours in the very same room where her roommate and Paul’s friend were trying in vain to get to sleep.
As the couple grew closer, with Paul making the two-hour trip from his home in Scarborough to St Catherines several times a week, the Homolkas jokingly began to refer to him as their ‘weekend son’. If Karla occasionally seemed a little too eager to please, well, that was no bad thing for a girl who’d primarily thought of herself for most of her life. And if Paul sometimes appeared overly controlling, again it wouldn’t do any harm for Princess Karla to learn that she couldn’t get her own way all the time. No, all in all, Paul Bernardo was just what Karla Homolka needed and her parents were only too delighted to welcome him into their slightly shabby but comfortable family home.
Messing around by the pool which had somehow been squeezed into the otherwise cramped back yard, Paul and Karla looked every inch the golden couple. Both effortlessly attractive and brimming with the confidence that comes with youth and beauty, they seemed made to be together. The love notes that passed endlessly between them and pet names they used for one
another just further enhanced the impression that they belonged to some elite club with just two lucky members. No wonder Tammy, just 12 when Karla first met Paul, idolised the pair of them. And Paul, to his credit, lavished her with brotherly attention, relishing the feeling of being looked up to and adored.
But beneath the shiny surface, handsome, too-good-to-
be-true
Paul Bernardo was hiding some ugly secrets. When he left his parents’ home in Scarborough every morning in his crisp white shirt and respectable dark suit, briefcase swinging lightly from his hand, he was closing the front door on a family history he’d do anything to forget. Despite his outward confidence and the impression he gave of having the world on a plate, his early life had been anything but easy.
Sure, the Bernardos didn’t lack for material stuff – there were the smart clothes, the new bikes, the pool in the back garden… But love? Affection? Nurturing? Those things were in very short supply.
The man Paul had thought of as his father – at least until his mother had told him a few years before in a fit of rage that he was actually the product of an affair with an ex-boyfriend – was an out and out creep. Accountant Ken Bernardo, already unmasked as a peeping Tom, had spent his free time roaming Paul’s childhood neighbourhood looking for women to spy on. He’d also sexually abused Paul’s older sister, Debbie, and would go on to serve time in jail for doing the same to Debbie’s own daughter.
At best, Paul’s mother, Marilyn, had a fragile grip on reality. During his teens, she’d holed up in a dark basement room, rarely coming out to supervise him or his older siblings, or to
tend to the increasingly filthy house. As Marilyn, suffering from an undiagnosed thyroid condition, piled on the weight, Ken Bernardo heaped scorn, ridicule and contempt on his wife. His occasional visits to the basement for sexual gratification did nothing to improve relations between the couple but instead instilled in him a sense of humiliation and self-loathing which he invariably transferred back to his wife, stepping up the insults and vitriol.
According to local legend his ‘father’ referred to Marilyn as ‘it’ while Paul preferred the moniker ‘slut’. Even before the revelations about his paternity, there was never much in the way of mother-son bonding, but afterwards there was nothing but undisguised mutual antipathy, and Paul rarely bothered to hide his disdain for Marilyn and the way she lived.
What Marilyn Bernardo taught her younger son was that women are cheaters, that they’re unclean and worthy only of contempt. And what Ken Bernardo taught him was that sex is something dirty that happens furtively in darkness and has everything to do with power and control and nothing to do with love. What the relationship between the two of them taught him was that marriage is about abuse rather than equality, about self-gratification rather than mutual support, lust rather than happiness.
That’s a hell of a legacy, wouldn’t you say?
Perhaps unsurprisingly given his background, Paul had had problems with his early sexual relationships. His girlfriends, initially attracted by his wholesome good looks and easy charm,
tended to go off him rapidly once he revealed his predilection for violent, perverted sex.
‘Come on, it’ll be fun,’ he’d coax, trying to make the appeal in his blue eyes as irresistible as possible. But one look at the rope with which he was intending to tie them up or a hint of what he wanted them to do with the empty wine bottle on the table was usually enough to set alarm bells clanging.
But Paul Bernardo, who grew up in a house of deprivation, had vowed to deny himself nothing. If he couldn’t make women do what he wanted voluntarily, he’d just get them to do it some other way. By the time he met Karla at the age of 23, Paul had already started sexually assaulting women. Lurking in the shadows at night, he’d single out a lone woman, often walking home from a bus stop, and follow her. Brandishing a knife, he’d grab her from behind, touching her roughly, and getting a kick from the fear in her face as she realised, with sudden horror, what was happening. Other people’s terror excited him. In his view women deserved neither sympathy nor empathy. Anyone who was not a virgin was necessarily a slut; that was his philosophy.
But Karla was different. While sleeping with him meant she was still a ‘slut’ according to Paul’s warped way of thinking, she was such an enthusiastic one that he couldn’t resist her. Where other girlfriends had been repulsed by his inability to separate pain from pleasure – more specifically
their
pain,
his
pleasure – Karla seemed to delight in it.
‘I’ll do whatever you want to,’ she’d murmur, looking up at
him from those knowing, heavy-lidded eyes that seemed so incongruous in her fresh, 17-year-old face.
‘Fetch the handcuffs,’ she’d urge him. ‘Tell me what to do! You’re my king.’
No wonder Paul Bernardo, powerful lord and master of his own universe, was smitten. All his life he’d been driven to dominate – over his squalid surroundings, his dysfunctional family… In Karla Homolka he’d not only met someone he could dominate completely and fully, but who also enjoyed it, even seemed to egg him on to more extreme acts. Less than a month after their first fateful meeting, Karla sent him a card that read: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, there’s nothing more fun than a pervert like you!’ Encouraged, Paul decided to broach the subject of the sexual assaults he’d been carrying out.
‘How would you feel about me if I was a rapist?’ he asked his new cherubic, blonde teenage girlfriend.
‘That’d be cool,’ she replied.
It was a match made in heaven. Or hell.
The one problem with Karla, Paul’s biggest bone of contention, was that she wasn’t a virgin when they met. This enraged him. How could he fully dominate her when she’d been ‘owned’ before? For a bastard child who’d never felt he rightfully belonged in his family, who’d gone to school in hand-me-downs from his older siblings, ownership was essential. He didn’t want a second-hand car – he wanted a shiny new one. And he didn’t want a girlfriend who’d been ‘broken in’ by someone else. It was the same virgin/slut argument. No one wanted to sleep with a
slut, so the only other option was a virgin. Of course the Catch 22 was that, by sleeping with a virgin, he would automatically convert her into a slut, which would in turn make her a deserving target for his sadistic abuse and contempt.
For a while it seemed the issue of Karla’s virginity, or lack of it, would drive a permanent wedge between the perfect couple.
‘I’m so sorry for what I’ve done,’ Karla wrote in a heartfelt letter to her suddenly cold and wavering lover. ‘You’re the best person I’ve ever loved in my life… You deserve someone perfect, someone who is truly yours.’ Then came the chilling phrase: ‘There are no perfect people in the world: if you find your virgin, there will be something wrong with her.’
Of course there would be. As Oscar Wilde once said, each man kills the thing he loves. By deflowering a virgin, in his own warped mind, Paul would be creating a slut. Karla was more perceptive than she realised.
Paul quickly relented in the face of Karla’s abject remorse and grief, and she was once again reinstated as his princess, his cute little Karla-Curls, but the experience taught her two important lessons: one, that virginity was very, very important to her incredible new boyfriend, and two, that she never wanted to be without him and she’d do anything –
anything
– to keep him.
While Karla struggled with finishing school and keeping her demanding lover satisfied, Paul had other things on his mind. Not satisfied with just scaring lone females, he’d graduated to violent rape. Over a period of a few months he sadistically attacked women and girls, some as young as 15, raping them
repeatedly and brutally, and, in what became his unique modus operandi, forcing them to repeat demeaning and degrading phrases praising him for his sexual prowess and decrying their own worthlessness.
‘I love you,’ he’d have them say, again and again, as he raped them from behind, the blade of his knife pressing into their backs. ‘I’m a little slut.’
Hearing their terrified voices stammer out the words to his own twisted script, he felt a surge of pure power and vindication; his breaths came hotter and faster as he thrilled to the knowledge of his own potency. He was the king, he was entitled to have his sexual desires satisfied… And besides, these women were whores anyway – just listen to them!
But although he never bothered to disguise himself, and although the traumatised victims repeatedly gave police accurate descriptions of their young clean-cut attacker, Paul Bernardo was never apprehended. Even when a composite picture of the man who’d become known as ‘The Scarborough Rapist’ was released and people at work began to tease him about the similarities, no one seriously suspected him. Why would a man who had everything going for him, not to mention a gorgeous girlfriend who hung on his every word, need to rape anyone? The idea was ludicrous.