Bernardo doesn’t deserve deliverance

By Rosie DiManno / June 9, 2023

It is not an incontrovertible fact that Paul Bernardo is the worst murderer in the annals of Canadian crime.

There are others who can make that odious claim. From Robert Pickton, the pig farmer charged with killing 26 women, many of whom disappeared from Vancouver’s seedy Downtown Eastside, and feeding their remains to his swine; to Alek Minassian, who deliberately steered a van into pedestrians along Yonge Street, ultimately 11 innocent lives taken; to Mark Lépine, who slaughtered 14 female students at Ecole Polytechnique; to Gabriel Wortman, whose 13-hour rampage in Nova Scotia had a kill count of 22.

But for those of us of a certain age, there was something particularly abominable and repellent about Bernardo, murderer and torturer of teenagers Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, sexually sadistic rapist (in tandem with his fiancée-then-wife Karla Homolka) of those poor girls, guilty of manslaughter in the raping and death of Karla’s unconscious 15-year-old sister Tammy Homolka and, as the serial Scarborough Rapist, admitting to the sexual assault of at least 14 young women.

He was a predator. And while the Scarborough Rapist was going about his vile sex assault crimes, girls and women were terrified of walking home alone, standing at the bus stop alone, going to the mall alone. In the nearly three decades since Bernardo’s trial, people still continue to draw horrible triangulations relative to where they were from the vile couple’s home in Port Dalhousie, from Bernardo’s rape stomping grounds, their recalled tangential brushes with him.

He looms still as your worst nightmare.

I remember tough-skinned veteran reporters weeping during Bernardo’s trial, stricken most especially by the audio tapes heard in court – the video seen only by jurors and trial participants – which captured some of the assaults on Kristen and Leslie by Bernardo and Homolka. The families stepped out when those tapes were played – all except Leslie’s mother, Debbie, who stayed to somehow bear witness to her suffering child. Debbie Mahaffy’s sobs cut through that courtroom.

So, there is something particularly abominable and repellent in the discovery that Bernardo has been quietly moved from maximum security at Millhaven penitentiary in Kingston, where he’d been segregated from other inmates (along with the likes of Russell Williams and Mohammad Shafia), on 23-hour lockdown, and transferred to the medium-security La Macaza Institution in the Laurentians, near the Mont-Tremblant airport in Quebec.

Corrections Canada is loath to provide any details about how Bernardo is now being incarcerated. But La Macaza is described on the prison’s website, as “built on an open campus model.” It is elsewhere described as an institution for sexual offenders and those at risk of being harmed by other inmates.

Bernardo was sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years. But Justice Patrick LeSage additionally designated him a dangerous offender, which means the sentence was indeterminate. He could be kept behind bars for his entire life. From the bench, LeSage turned to the convicted murderer and said: “Mr. Bernardo … You have no right ever to be released. The behavioural restraint that you require is jail. You require it, in my view, for the rest of your natural life. You are a sexually sadistic psychopath.”

I thought, on that day, that Bernardo would never again see the light of day with an unobstructed view of the sky. Now, I’m not so sure.

Medium-security is one step down from maximum-security and one step up toward an eventual release date. Bernardo has twice been denied even limited day parole, most recently in June 2021, at a hearing where he spent some two hours delivering a self-pity oration, whining that he’s spent more than 10,000 days with no significant human contact. The hearing panel came back with a swift and hard no: “Your understanding and insight remains limited and as a result … you remain to be a high risk for sexual reoffending.”

Yet memories dim, outrage wanes and the correctional system itself is designed not merely to punish and deter but to rehabilitate and reintegrate. The French and Mahaffy families have attended both parole hearings thus far – the next is scheduled for November – giving heart-wrenching victim impact statements. But Doug French, for one, is 92 years old. How long can any of them carry on this mission for their slain daughters? And who will speak for those dead girls when the parents are gone?

Tim Danson, who’s legally represented the families from the outset, said he was informed about the transfer in a phone call from a Corrections official last week. He was taken aback and asked for the reason behind the move.

“They said, based on Bernardo’s privacy interests, they weren’t able to disclose that,” Danson told the Star. “I said that doesn’t make any sense because we’ve had two parole hearings with significant evidence presented, including the fact that he’s (still) designated a dangerous offender. That’s a very high threshold that has to be established beyond a reasonable doubt. The parole board has said he’s just as dangerous now as he ever was.

“We need an explanation.”

There will be none forthcoming.

“Then I asked, can you at least tell me, in medium security, is he going to be in the general population? Is he in segregation? Is he on a range of sex offenders as he was in Millhaven? They couldn’t tell me that either. So basically I ended up with nothing.”

The families are understandably shocked and distressed, added Danson. “Just like the parole hearings, this takes them back to Day One and undoes some of the progress that they’ve made just trying to still deal with the loss of their daughters, which of course never goes away. They’re very, very upset and have asked me to pursue, through the media, for the public to express its own outrage and demand answers to our questions.”

Danson argued at a Federal Court of Appeal hearing in February – not aimed specifically and singularly at Bernardo but also the cases of cop-killers Craig Munro and Clinton Gayle – that victims’ families should be entitled to access information available to parole board members: psychological assessments, discipline history, education, visitors, common-law unions, progress reports. All are withheld from the public. It’s unclear when a ruling will be rendered but Danson has knocked his head against this anvil many times over the years.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, who apparently didn’t even know about Bernardo’s transfer, released a statement on Friday calling the move “shocking and incomprehensible,” vowing to address the decision-making process with Corrections Commissioner Anne Kelly.

The secrecy makes everything worse. Courts are supposed to be open with information available to everyone. That’s a fundamental premise of the judicial system. But courts – and the federal government – have taken the view, citing old case law, that parole hearings are not quasi-judicial proceedings; they’re “inquisitorial and nonadversarial.”

“We believe the hearings are public institutions carried out in public and the public has the same rights as they would in any other court,” Danson said.

In the matter of Bernardo: “When you are designated a dangerous offender and convicted to life imprisonment for two murders, there’s a punishment factor as well. The punishment factor is not just not being eligible for parole for 25 years and then you have it, as he’s tried for the last four years unsuccessfully. But that the rights and freedoms of people like (Bernardo) should be the rights and freedoms that exist in a maximum-security federal penitentiary.

“This guy doesn’t deserve less restrictions that he’ll get in medium security. He should be spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security federal penitentiary. That was part of the punishment.”

Bernardo is asking – and indeed, has somewhat already secured – relief from the full consequences of his life sentence and dangerous offender status.

He deserves not a smidge of deliverance.

Twitter: @rdimanno