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From Amazon
Karla Homolka is an enigma. After a decade of investigation, a previous book about the case (Invisible Darkness), access to police officers, attorneys, doctors, and internal documents, and correspondence with the subject herself, that is the upshot of author Stephen Williams's updated account, Pact with the Devil. No kidding. People who commit the kind of crimes Homolka committed--drugging, raping, and ultimately killing her own sister and helping to abduct and sexually assault two other teenaged girls--cannot be knowable to the rational. The gist of the author's new, rambling book is that everything about the case--not just the crimes--was a travesty. Few people in Pact with the Devil emerge worse than Inspector Vince Bevan, head of the Green Ribbon Task Force that investigated the deaths of abducted teens Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy. Williams states flatly that Bevan's ineptitude and hubris were the real reasons Homolka received a lenient plea-bargain deal in exchange for testifying against her husband, Paul Bernardo, and not a lack of evidence. "The deal with Karla was precipitated by Vince Bevan so that he could participate in the arrest of Paul Bernardo and execute his own search warrant on their matrimonial home." (The Toronto Police already had DNA evidence fingering Bernardo as the "Scarborough Rapist"; Bevan, Williams argues, wanted to keep him in his own Niagara-region jurisdiction to face murder charges first.) Williams also contends that Bevan's "unusual and arguably inappropriate relationship" with the owners of the Port Dalhousie home rented by Homolka and Bernardo led him to withhold "the internal devastation another police force ... would have invariably unleashed on the interior of the house." And indeed, after 69 days, the search failed to discover trace vomit from French on a carpet or the videotapes Homolka and Bernardo had made of their brutal attacks and hidden in an upstairs bathroom. Also compelling is Williams's summary dismissal of Homolka as a compliant victim of a sexual sadist or a battered woman suffering post-traumatic stress disorder--diagnoses supported by many of her doctors. As Williams points out, those assessments conveniently overlook the fact that prior to her marriage, when Tammy Lyn Homolka was killed, Karla Homolka was living with her parents and sisters, not alone under the influence of Bernardo. But Pact with the Devil is also a frustrating, uneven read. The author favours 10-dollar words, goes off on ludicrous tangents, and soapboxes against his critics. While the graphic nature of many scenes will sicken readers, the sensationalized jailhouse correspondence between the author and Homolka consists mainly of longwinded and mundane accounts of her incarceration. Perhaps most odious, the victims' families, despite everything else they've endured, must now deal with photos in the first printing of Williams's book depicting the Tammy Lyn post-mortem and Mahaffy dismembered and encased in cement--photos gathered as part of the investigation that should never have been made public (future printings will not include the photos). All that aside, Williams succeeds in leaving little doubt of bungling across the board. Tammy Lyn's death was initially ruled an accident in part because the investigating officers photographed--but failed to watch!--the videotape Homolka and Bernardo had made of her rape and left in plain view. Millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were needlessly squandered. And Karla, thanks to her deal, walks absolutely free in July 2005 despite her documented participation in these crimes. --Kim Hughes
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