♪♪
McCrary: He was physically very punishing with the victims.
Beating them, abusing them, and eventually murdering them.
Manipulative, controlling, domineering, and astute enough
to get away with this for a long enough period of time.
He is our worst nightmare.
♪♪
Welcome to "Very Scary People."
I'm Donnie Wahlberg.
From May 1987 to April 1992, there were a series of
rapes, abductions, and murders of young women
just north of U.S.-Canadian border.
Authorities from several cities in Ontario
and FBI profilers from the United States
joined forces to try and capture
those responsible for the vicious attacks.
Who was behind these horrific crimes?
No one could have imagined how disturbing the answer would be.
Here's Part One of "The Ken & Barbie Killers."
♪♪
Rosen: The city of Toronto sits on the north shore of Lake Ontario,
and Scarborough is on the eastern edge of the city.
It's not an unsafe place, and that's what made the fact
that you had a serial rapist running around
the eastern end of the city so concerning.
♪♪
The Scarborough attacks permeated the media.
Everyone heard about it. Everyone knew.
Reporter: Police have been tracking the movement of this serial rapist.
The man has targeted young women walking alone at night
at various locations throughout Scarborough.
Pron: Women were walking home, getting off a bus late at night,
and then they were getting attacked,
all in that one area of the city,
and that part of the city became,
like, a forbidden zone to travel at night.
Garofalo: Nobody could understand, how is this person
doing this time and time again?
Pron: He attacked all his victims from behind
and none of them really got a good look at his face at all.
They just knew generally that he was mid-20s,
sort of blonde hair, white male,
and he was just getting away with it.
Our fear was, if he wasn't stopped soon,
that this is gonna escalate to murder.
♪♪
Kenzora: It was the Thursday before the Easter long weekend.
15-year-old Kristen French was walking home from school.
Hemsworth: And she didn't live more than a few blocks
away from her school.
Pron: And she passed by a church.
There's a parking lot in front,
and there was a car parked there,
and there was this woman.
She had a big road map on the hood,
and she was all fluttered
and she was trying to find this street
and she couldn't find it, and she saw Kristen walking by.
She asked her for help.
Rosen: And says, "We're lost. Can you show us where to go?"
Pron: Kristen French, being just a decent gal,
came over to help this woman.
♪♪
While she was helping her find this street,
a man dragged her into the car.
Pushed her into the back seat, and away they go.
Kenzora: Kristen would normally come home right after school
and let the dog out.
Garofalo: She was the kind of person that if she said
she was going to be home at a certain hour,
she was going to be home at that hour,
and if she wasn't, she would call
and let you know why she wasn't going to be home.
Kenzora: The mom had called home from work to talk to her.
[ Phone ringing ] She wasn't home.
So, the day that she disappeared struck them
as unusual right away.
Garofalo: And they were very worried and they were calling around.
They thought maybe she had gone to someone's home,
but they knew in their heart of hearts,
this was not their daughter's routine.
Just based on the nature of Kristen French
and her dependability, her disappearance
was immediately reported to police.
Reporter: This is 15-year-old Kristen Dawn French.
She's 5'5", weighs 110 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes.
She was last seen wearing her school uniform
of a green plaid skirt with a green v-neck sweater.
She was also wearing a black leather jacket.
Kenzora: Kristen grew up in St. Catharines,
and she, by all accounts,
was a very popular, straight A student.
Garofalo: The first place I went to was St. Catharines,
where I interviewed the French family
for the syndicated show "A Current Affair."
And it was gut-wrenching.
The life had been drained from them.
It's such a hopeless feeling, sitting at home,
knowing that the possibility
that your daughter is going through something just horrific,
and you can't do a thing to stop it.
Garofalo: Kristen was -- they called her Kristie,
and she was the perfect daughter.
She was punctual and dependable, reliable, responsible.
She was a figure skater.
She rowed for her high school.
Kenzora: She was from a big family.
It was the second marriage for her parents,
so she had older brothers and sisters,
but they were all very close,
and I believe she'd had her first boyfriend,
and she was excited because I believe one of her siblings
was getting married soon.
Garofalo: The Frenches' home was full of photographs on the mantles
and on the shelves of Kristen French.
Beautiful girl. Tall, dark hair.
You know, seemingly having life in front of her,
which made those photographs more poignant
and even sadder than, you know, you could ever imagine.
Doug French: If anybody's seen my daughter, Kristen French,
I'd like to phone the Niagara police as quickly as possible.
The abduction of Kristen French was a major case in Canada.
This is broad daylight. She's walking home from school.
It's in the afternoon in a populated area.
We had eyewitnesses.
Kenzora: A witness came forward to say she had been driving
by the church parking lot, looked over her shoulder,
and saw what she thought were kids fooling around,
and they were kind of pushing back and forth,
and someone got pushed into the car,
but she thought about it for a second, like,
"Oh, that's odd."
Then she said, "Oh, it's probably just teenagers
goofing around," and she kept going.
And it's just so tragic that no one knew
what was really happening.
Kenzora: So as soon as she had heard that Kristen was missing,
the woman who had seen the incident
at the car called police.
Shlosberg: When police were searching for clues
regarding the disappearance of Kristen French,
they found a very crucial piece of evidence.
They found her shoe in the parking lot of the church.
McCrary: A sign of the struggle there
when they forced her into the car.
It was identified for sure as her,
and there's no question as to who the victim was.
Reporter: Her shoe was found, suggesting she struggled with her abductor
before being pulled into a car.
I know it's cliche, but it was a parent's worst nightmare.
We just want her back.
♪♪
Reporter: 15-year-old Kristen French was apparently abducted
in broad daylight from a church parking lot on Thursday,
less than a kilometer from home.
McCrary: Kristen French had been abducted in St. Catharines
while walking home from school.
She had been sort of lured into a parking lot
of this Grace Lutheran church.
Stranger-based abduction in broad daylight,
a very high-risk offense.
Reporter: Police made the deduction based on forensic evidence --
a shoe and part of a makeup kit that could have been lost
as Kristen struggled with her abductor.
McCrary: She was resisting, fighting,
shoving her into the back of the car,
and the car took off at a high rate of speed.
Reporter: And based on what police call a solid witness account,
they're also looking for a car similar to this --
a 1982 or newer Camaro or Firebird,
off-white or cream in color.
Hemsworth: It seemed that the best information
was that the person or people who had taken Kristen French
were in a cream-colored Camaro or similar car,
and there were billboards even in our community.
There was a huge appeal. "Have you seen this car?"
Malbon: They talked to a lot of witnesses.
They thought it was some kind of a Camaro,
and it turned out it was not that car.
Hemsworth: And the police, having so little to go on,
could only place their faith in what witnesses had seen.
Kenzora: When Kristen was kidnapped, it was Easter weekend,
and almost right away, there were massive searches
arranged for Kristen French that started on the Friday
and lasted through the entire weekend.
Reporter: As many as 2,000 people gathered to help search
the north end of St. Catharines
for clues to Kristen's whereabouts.
I joined the search for Kristen French.
I remember we did sort of a systematic line search,
and we all walked sort of a line
and spread out to make sure that we covered all the areas.
There was always that glimmer of hope
that you would find something.
There was this tremendous feeling in the community
of wishing to do something helpful,
because it was so unlikely.
Kenzora: For someone to be grabbed off the street
in the middle of the day,
a young person walking home from school, it just doesn't happen.
It really doesn't happen, especially in St. Catharines
at that time.
Garofalo: St. Catharines is a quaint,
sleepy little town between Toronto and Niagara Falls.
It's known for its wine country,
and it's just a beautiful little town.
It's also the home to this lovely couple,
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
♪♪
Look in the mirror. Come here.
Kenzora: Karla Homolka grew up in St. Catharines
with her parents and two sisters.
Garofalo: She had a sister, Tammy and Lori.
Tammy was the youngest.
Kenzora: Karla loved animals, worked at pet stores,
and then at a vet clinic.
Pron: She wanted to be a veterinarian.
She had a love of animals.
One of her friends told me when they went out camping one time,
there was a bug sort of crawling in their tent,
and rather than stomping it with a shoe,
she picked it up gently and took it outside,
because she couldn't imagine
doing anything else to this little bug.
McCrary: But she did have this little bit of a wild streak.
She sort of craved less boredom,
a little more activity in her life,
a little more excitement in her life.
Kenzora: And you know, she was pretty focused
on getting a boyfriend and getting married,
and she had some close girlfriends
who spent a lot of time, you know,
dreaming about the day they were gonna get married.
They had what they called the Diamond Club,
which was talking about the diamond rings
they hoped to get for their engagement.
She had a path in life, and she was gonna stick to that path.
Whatever she had to do, she was gonna do.
Karla did have relationships in high school,
but it wasn't really until she met Paul Bernardo
that things really changed for Karla.
Kenzora: Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka
met in a hotel lobby in Scarborough.
I believe she was 17, he was 23,
and she was in Scarborough for a pet food convention,
because she worked at a pet store as a teenager,
and he and some friends had shown up
at the lobby of the hotel late at night
to hit the 24-hour restaurant,
and she came down with one of her friends.
Rosen: They were in their pajamas,
and they decide they're gonna go down
to the Howard Johnson restaurant for apple pie and coffee.
Pron: And in walks Bernardo with a friend,
and the two of them seem to just hit it off.
Rosen: And the next thing you know is they've all adjourned
to the girls' room,
and from that point on, it was pretty hot and heavy romance.
Pron: And as she said, "He was the perfect man for me.
He was the man of my dreams.
This is the man I want to marry."
Shlosberg: They seemed like the ideal couple.
They got engaged at Niagara Falls,
and I think she thought she had her happy ever after.
Pron: And they started going out to St. Catharines a lot
and spending more time in St. Catharines,
and that was where Kristen French was abducted.
Reporter: Kristen French's parents remain in seclusion,
surrounded by family and friends,
desperate for any news of their daughter.
By Sunday, I believe it was, Kristen's father went on TV
and made an appeal for his daughter,
and it is so emotional.
Kristen, if you hear or read this,
we want you to know that we are thinking of you
and that everything that can be done is being done.
They said to her, "Just know that we will always be
looking for you, no matter what happens."
As a mom, boy, that really hits home.
Kenzora: And it was absolutely heartbreaking,
but more so, knowing that Kristen was alive
and she was watching it.
♪♪
Reporter: It is a quiet, peaceful city by the lake,
but look below the surface, and there is a ripple of fear.
Hemsworth: Kristen French was popular, social, from a loving home,
and in broad daylight, she was taken.
Reporter: The 15-year-old honor student disappeared last Thursday
on her way home from school.
Police believe she was abducted,
likely in the parking lot of this nearby church.
There was this collective realization
that something terrible is in our midst.
Sacks: Violent crime had been escalating
before Kristen French's abduction,
really beginning in 1987 with the Scarborough rapes.
Scarborough was basically a very safe area.
Well-kept single-family homes.
Just a lovely, lovely neighborhood.
And all of a sudden, there was terror, real terror going on,
because there's this rapist on the loose,
and people lived in fear.
Reporter: From 1987 to 1990,
he struck fear into the hearts of the women of Toronto.
He became known as the Scarborough Rapist
because the attacks took place in the Scarborough section
of East Toronto.
19 assaults in all.
I hate him. He tore my whole life apart.
He's the lowest form of life there is.
Malbon: He would grab women as young as 14.
He'd grab them from behind, and he did terrible things.
He'd put a knife to their throat and said,
"If you look at me, I'll slit your throat."
One of the victims, he had made her beg for her life
and plead for her life.
Kenzora: And the attacks, each one got a little bit more violent,
you know, as time progressed.
[ Phone ringing ]
Reporter: 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.
McCrary: The sixth victim, he had beaten her
so profusely that he had fractured her collarbone.
Pron: It was just horrifying to hear.
Another woman, he stomped on her --
like, her forearm, and broke it,
and one of his other victims, he wrote on the back
"Raped by S.R.," the Scarborough Rapist.
This clearly was escalating and escalating rapidly.
Kenzora: Perhaps because he was getting more confident
that he wasn't going to get caught.
Pron: The cops were really frustrated.
They put in long hours.
Long hours, and they just couldn't catch him,
and they got the help of the FBI,
trying to get a profile of the rapist.
McCrary: The profile could be helpful
in understanding the motive of the crime,
and the offender they were dealing with,
he had a need to punish
and humiliate and degrade these victims.
So, there was clear anger at women,
and a lot of time, this is transferred aggression.
They're really angry at someone else in their life,
but the victims are taking the brunt of the anger and abuse.
We found that the offender was degrading, humiliating,
and scripting the victims to engage
in self-humiliating verbal behavior,
calling themselves sluts and bitches and so forth,
but also calling him very complementary things.
He would say, "Tell me I'm good. Tell me you love me.
Tell me I'm better than your boyfriend."
He would rush them, slam them down off the sidewalk,
into shrubbery, typically, force them down,
and then immediately begin to attack.
The amount of force was excessive.
He used more than was necessary to gain
or maintain control over the victim.
This could easily escalate up to homicide.
The last rape, in fact, was so violent,
investigators believed he would kill his next victim.
Officer: We're doing the best we can.
Hopefully, hopefully, somebody has an idea who he is.
McCrary: Serial rapists typically start in an area
in which they're very comfortable and familiar.
It's low risk for them.
They know all the alleyways and the ins and the outs
and fences and how to get home.
And so we thought that he really lived in Scarborough.
This was his hunting ground.
Another indication that he lived in the area
was his demand that they not look at him.
They might recognize him around the neighborhood.
No one had really seen the attacker's face,
so the police didn't really have much to go on,
but then the attacker made a mistake.
Pron: His first dozen victims,
he attacked them all from behind.
And his 13th victim, lady was walking down the street
and he was walking towards her.
Kenzora: He started a conversation with her.
Pron: He started walking with her,
and they got to a dark alley, then he attacked her.
But she was able to see his face.
And she was able to give police a very detailed description.
Reporter: Victims help police draw up a composite picture of the rapist.
He was blonde and nice-looking, they say.
Kenzora: These eyes frightened her when she saw them.
♪♪
When they did get a police sketch of this
"Scarborough Rapist,"
it was put on the front page of the news.
Kenzora: And it was so well-done that numerous people saw it
and called police and said, "I know who that is.
That's Paul Bernardo."
Reporter: Several hundred suspects were questioned,
including University of Toronto graduate Paul Bernardo,
an aspiring accountant.
Paul Bernardo, at the time of the Scarborough rapes,
was living at home with his parents in Scarborough,
where he had grown up.
Pron: When he grew up, he was a Boy Scout,
and he had blonde hair and blue eyes,
and he was very friendly and popular
and very sociable and very outgoing,
and he delivered newspapers when he was a little kid.
You know, all the neighbors loved him.
He was a really good-looking boy,
and from all accounts, he was a great kid growing up.
He was smart and he was polite, kind.
And he went to university, where he studied accounting
and started to work at a job at Price Waterhouse.
Seems like a guy who's going places.
Hunter: But Paul Bernardo looks like
the Scarborough Rapist police sketch.
Pron: The police called him in for an interview,
and he came in willingly.
He was very open. He was very at ease.
He wasn't nervous.
He said, "Yeah, sure, it looks like me, but, you know,
it's not me, but it sure as heck looks like me."
Kenzora: They questioned Paul Bernardo about the crimes,
and they asked if he would volunteer a DNA sample,
and he agreed.
Back then, DNA was fairly new.
The lab that analyzed DNA didn't have a lot of resources,
so they got that sample, and unfortunately,
it was put on a shelf with a whole bunch of other samples,
where it sat for a number of years.
Pron: He just didn't seem like the kind of suspect
that would do this.
Reporter: Neighbors suggested he was a dead ringer for the composite,
but after interviewing him, police let him go.
No one was arrested.
And in the meantime, Paul Bernardo moved to
St. Catharines to live with Karla Homolka and her family.
♪♪
As soon as Paul Bernardo moved to St. Catharines,
there were no more rapes in Scarborough.
Unfortunately, there were other attacks to come.
♪♪
Welcome back to "Very Scary People."
In April 1992, police across Ontario
were searching for any clues that could lead them
to finding 15-year-old Kristen French,
who was abducted in broad daylight
on her way home from school.
Family and friends held candlelight vigils,
praying Kristen would be found safe and sound.
But for almost two weeks,
there was no sign of the missing teen.
Reporter: The agony of the past few days
was clearly evident on the faces of Kristen French's family.
They say they feel Kristen is still alive.
McCready: Kristen French went missing,
and it struck fear in our hearts,
but there was always that glimmer of hope,
there was always the possibility that she will come home alive.
No one knew what happened.
We have to find her.
♪♪
Reporter: The body of the young women was found in a ditch
in Burlington's north end.
The grim discovery was made at 9:45 AM
by a man searching for scrap metal.
Kristen's body was found in a ditch in Burlington.
McCrary: Her body was recovered.
Her hair had been chopped off.
We get the M.E. report, and we find
she'd definitely been violently assaulted.
McCready: It was shocking,
the finality that you'd never wanted to come true.
Reporter: Niagara regional police went to the home
of Doug and Donna French near St. Catharines
to notify them about the young victim.
Donna: I was just so sure that they'd find her.
I was just so sure, and then when we found her,
I just kept thinking, "Why did he have to kill her?"
McCready: Everybody was just devastated.
Now, it's like, what can we do
to find the people who did this to her?
They're still out there. They can do it again.
And that was the fear.
Garofalo: Police were searching for clues
for Kristen French's abduction and murder.
It was reminiscent of an unsolved case
that took place nearby the year before,
the murder case of Leslie Mahaffy.
Hunter: It was a dark, scary time.
There is something wrong here.
Reporter: The nightmare for the Mahaffy family began
June 14th, 1991,
when 14-year-old Leslie disappeared.
No families should ever have to go through
what we've gone through.
Kenzora: Leslie Mahaffy was a 14-year-old girl with lots of friends.
She was fun. She was cool.
She liked to hang out with her friends.
Jen: I met Leslie when I was 14 through mutual friends.
She was dating somebody that I knew.
She was very quiet.
That's the first thing I noticed.
She was very quiet.
As time went on, that changed.
She had absolutely beautiful golden hair,
and she was absolutely gorgeous when she smiled.
Hemsworth: She had a very loving mother and father,
a very loving brother,
and she lived in a nice community in a nice city.
Like, Burlington was seen as a very, very safe place.
♪♪
Kenzora: The night that Leslie disappeared,
she had attended a memorial for a young gentleman
who was killed in a car accident.
There was a car crash involving four teenagers on a road
that high school students called Rollercoaster Road.
Sadly, all of them die.
Jen: And it was a very, very, very tragic thing to go through,
especially considering what was to come.
Reporter: 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.
A bunch of kids from high school
had gone to the funeral home that night,
and then Leslie went to hang out with the friends
after they all left the funeral home.
By around 11:00, Leslie realized
that she should start walking home,
because she had a curfew,
and she walked with another friend,
and they stopped along the way to talk
because he was gonna be a pallbearer
at the funeral the next day, and he was really nervous,
and by now, it was well past Leslie's curfew,
and she realized she better get home.
Hemsworth: And so he walked her home, and it was late at night.
She got home at 2:00 in the morning.
All the lights were off.
She tried all the doors.
Pron: Side door was locked.
And tried the front door. It was locked as well.
Hemsworth: She was not necessarily comfortable
waking her parents at that hour.
She was concerned about curfew and disturbing them.
Kenzora: And so, she came back and said to the friend,
"Don't worry. I'll get in."
She said goodbye to the friend.
You know, "I'll see you tomorrow at the funeral."
So, he left. He looked back.
The last time he saw her,
she was standing on the driveway in front of her garage.
What we found out later was that she left
and went to a phone booth
and called her friend to say, "I'm locked out.
Can I come stay at your house?"
Friend said no, so she walked back to her house.
And that was the last anyone heard from her.
♪♪
I think the next morning, when the friend called to see
where Leslie was
because they were gonna go to the funeral together,
that people started to realize that she didn't make it home.
Jen: That day, I was actually at one of the funerals.
I remember my parents coming to me
and telling me that a girl was missing.
Once I found out who it was, I couldn't believe it.
Leslie just disappeared.
Hemsworth: She was reported missing by her parents,
and there was an investigation.
Jen: I think that's when I started to think,
"Uh-oh. Something really bad has happened to her."
♪♪
Reporter: 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy went missing on June 15th.
She'd been at a funeral home to say goodbye to a friend.
Mahaffy disappeared after heading home.
Leslie Mahaffy, she was reported as a missing teen.
Some people just assumed that she had run away.
Hemsworth: And everyone hoped for the best,
and then everyone discovered the worst.
♪♪
Kenzora: A fisherman at Lake Gibson discovered concrete blocks
in the lake one Saturday morning,
and then each of the blocks contained a body part,
and eventually, those body parts were identified
as belonging to Leslie Mahaffy.
Reporter: The dismembered remains of 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy
were found in a nearby lake.
She had disappeared two weeks before.
Malbon: When she was discovered, it was the horror
that someone actually took the time to dismember a body,
put it in concrete, and dump it in a lake.
Jen: The fact that it can happen to somebody that you know is --
it's kind of numbing.
And I still was hoping that maybe the police
had made a mistake, but it was her.
No one deserves that.
♪♪
Kenzora: When Leslie Mahaffy's body parts were being discovered
in Lake Gibson,
not far away, at an elaborate fairytale wedding,
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were getting married.
Priest: Dear friends, we have come together
in the presence of God...
Malbon: There's all sorts of videos of it.
They're looking happy.
Garofalo: They had their wedding ceremony in Niagara-on-the-Lake,
which is just a spectacularly beautiful place.
Kenzora: With a horse-drawn carriage, speeches from Paul
that indicated he had found the love of his life.
Pron: One of her friends said, "You know,
you're luckiest person in the world.
He's such a great find. You're so lucky."
Sacks: This beautiful, lavish wedding almost didn't happen
because of this tragedy that the Homolka family
had suffered six months earlier.
Look at the camera.
Kenzora: Tammy was Karla's happy, loving little sister.
They spend a lot of holidays together
and just quality family time, hanging out.
It was December 23rd, the night before Christmas Eve.
Rosen: There is a family party at the house.
Alcohol is served, and Karla's younger sister
Tammy has a lot to drink.
Kenzora: There's video footage of that night,
'cause Paul Bernardo was videotaping everything.
And there's video footage of him just saying,
"Hey, Tammy, how you feeling?"
And she's like, "Oh, I'm seeing double."
So you can tell she really is feeling pretty woozy.
And after the parents go to bed and Lori, the other sister,
goes to her room to call her boyfriend,
Paul, Karla, and Tammy go to the basement.
To watch movies.
And while they're watching movies, Tammy passes out.
Kenzora: She starts to throw up.
She begins choking on her vomit. They called 911.
When the paramedics and the police came to the house,
Paul Bernardo was hysterical.
He was apparently banging his head against the wall and,
"Why, why, why is this happening?"
And unfortunately, Tammy died the next day in hospital.
Rosen: The officers who attended didn't see anything out of the ordinary
except a young teenager who had had too much alcohol
and fallen asleep,
and it was treated as an accident.
Pron: But what was suspicious was she had,
like, burn marks all around her mouth and all here,
and I know I'm talking to one of the officers
who said that just bothered him.
Sacks: Yet after this tragedy, Karla was very insistent,
and so the wedding, they went ahead and they had it.
Kenzora: There was a lot of tension in the Homolka house
after Tammy died, in particular because Karla was carrying on
with wedding planning as if nothing happened.
Pron: Tammy had died and her parents had to pay for the funeral,
and Bernardo wanted a very elaborate wedding,
and Bernardo said, "Well, take out another mortgage
on your house to pay for our wedding,"
and that caused a rift right there.
That's not the behavior of a grieving family member.
Sacks: It would seem to occur to most people
that maybe you don't celebrate with a lavish wedding
when your younger sister has just died.
But not to Karla.
Kenzora: She was selfish and self-centered,
and it was about her, and at a certain point,
I believe her parents had said to her, like,
"Can we tone this down a little bit?
The wedding is gonna cost a fortune."
And Karla wrote to friends and in her diary
that she couldn't believe that her parents
were not willing to spend all this money on the wedding.
You know, Tammy was dead.
It's not her fault,
and that they had to spend all this money on the funeral,
and she was really, really miffed about it,
so much so that her and Paul
actually moved out before the wedding.
Shlosberg: And they moved into a sweet, charming
pink home in Port Dalhousie.
Karla says, "I'm gonna have this big wedding.
I'm gonna have it all."
And nothing was gonna stand in her way.
[ Bridal march playing ]
♪♪
Shlosberg: These are two people that really cared
about what other people thought of them.
Hemsworth: They had a fancy wedding and reception
in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
And this is the big wedding that Karla has demanded.
And to them, that had the kind of markings of success.
Pron: It seemed like they were the perfect couple.
The Ken and Barbie, you know, the dream marriage.
But in the wedding party, one of the bridesmaids said,
"It felt like I was going to a funeral."
Hemsworth: You can't see genuine happiness in their faces.
Pron: Their friends just assumed it was just,
you know, a little nerves and all that on the wedding day.
They knew something was wrong, but they just couldn't put
their finger on, you know, what exactly it was.
Garofalo: They are almost mannequin-like.
The smiles were fake, because they knew this life
they were leading was a fraud.
♪♪
[ Wedding march playing ]
♪♪
Malbon: On the day that Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo get married...
I, Paul, take thee, Karla, to be my wife.
...on that very day,
they discover Leslie Mahaffy's body.
Reporter: 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy went missing on June 15th.
Two weeks later, her dismembered body parts
were found encased in concrete in Lake Gibson.
Learning how to live with the very complicated
and unresolved grief when your child is murdered
is an unrelenting task.
We were already living in a climate
of growing fear and concern.
Hunter: People were terrified.
It all began with the Scarborough rapes.
Reporter: Since May the 4th, 1987, numerous sexual assaults
have been attributed to a man dubbed the Scarborough Rapist.
Kenzora: Leslie Mahaffy was killed,
and Kristen French was kidnapped in broad daylight.
Donna: She was a beautiful person.
She was kind, and she was just very sensitive,
and I think, how could anybody destroy that?
Someone awful is out there.
We have to find who did this,
or more young girls are gonna die.
Everyone began to wonder at that time
if there might be a connection.
What are the chances that two girls go missing
in a certain timeframe?
It is a really weird coincidence.
Kenzora: People were starting to get worried
that there might be something bigger at play here.
McCrary: They were bringing in all the resources
available to them to get an answer to this.
I think it's important that everybody realize
that this danger is out there.
So, the question is, were these cases related, yes or no?
There were similarities.
Both had been physically assaulted.
Both had been asphyxiated.
Both had bruising to their bodies
as though someone had been kneeling on their back,
maybe using a ligature strangulation
or strangling them from behind.
The other issue was geography.
Geography always plays a role in these cases,
and we had sort of two anchor points --
Burlington and St. Catharines.
Hemsworth: Burlington and St. Catharines are 45 minutes away.
Leslie, who had disappeared in Burlington,
her remains were discovered in St. Catharines.
Kristen, who had lived in St. Catharines, Ontario,
her remains were discovered in Burlington.
Actually, a few hundred yards
from the grave of Leslie Mahaffy.
Which was a weird thing,
because you could almost see Leslie's gravestone
from where Kristen's body was found.
So it was clearly some kind of message.
I think everyone knew at that point
that there was a serial killer on the loose.
Reporter: Police are not discounting the possibility
a serial killer may be at work in the area.
As the investigation continued, I got a call from Vince Bevan,
who was in charge of the investigation.
He had this unusual request from a TV station
who wanted to know if they could be helpful in some way.
Could they do a documentary?
So I said, "Let's use this to our advantage.
We can communicate with the offender."
Because we know in any of these cases,
these high-profile cases,
these offenders follow the media.
Gregg, if he is watching this program tonight,
what do you think he might be experiencing?
Don McLean, he asked me,
"Well, if the offender is watching now,
what would you say?"
I said, "If he's listening, I want to tell him
you're going to be apprehended."
It's just a question of when.
Kenzora: And he was watching.
Garofalo: He lived in a pretty, little pink house
with his beautiful wife.
Who would have ever thought that this man
with this beautiful, little pink house could be such a monster?
Which is probably one of the reasons why he got away with it.
He didn't believe he would ever get caught.
That was the beginning of, you know, his end.
♪♪
Paul Bernardo is our worst nightmare.
Pron: He was able to hide his true personality
beneath this glowing face
of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy next door.
McCrary: Peeping, prowling, looking in windows,
watching women undress.
Sacks: And as he gets away with it and gets away with it,
it's not enough anymore.
McCrary: This is just a stepping stone.
This is just the beginning.
Rosen: Paul is sick, but he never killed anyone
until he met Karla.
McCrary: She was much more heavily involved
that she had portrayed early on.
Rosen: It's like a bullseye.
You start at the edges and you move your way into the center.
We watched some of the videos.
Malbon: And I remember letting out this loud gasp,
because it was just so horrifying.
Bryant: Everyone knew, of course, that you were listening
to the last minutes in the lives of these young women.
Bernardo: Are you in the Christmas cheer? That's all I want to know.
She says here, "I'm giving her as a gift to you."
Garofalo: Knowing that she was gonna be killed,
she started to talk back to him,
fighting right until the very end.
She begged Karla to let her go, and Karla wouldn't do it.
Kenzora: It was horrible.
Like, it imprinted on your brain forever.
Malbon: They looked like the nice, young couple,
yet behind all of this facade was such awful evil.
♪♪
After more than a year of trying to solve the murders
of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy,
police were finally closing in on a suspect --
a young, good-looking accountant named Paul Bernardo.
But the saga was far from over.
When the public learned the sordid details of the crimes
and who else was involved,
it sent shockwaves throughout the country
and the world in Part 2 of "The Ken & Barbie Killers."
I'm Donnie Wahlberg.
Thanks for watching.
Goodnight.