Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

Latest Bernardo/Homolka news (via Google News)

Ten years ago, this wasn't just a true crime story. It was also a key moment for the Internet, as the free movement of information across borders clashed with a judge's decision to ban trial information from being published in Canada. The books above don't necessarily discuss much of that side of things, focusing more on the crimes.

For detailed backstory, order the books above by clicking on the covers (links are to Amazon.ca). The first two are average true crime books by newspaper reporters. The Williams books are more controversial, and draw on information the other writers didn't have access to, including correspondence between Williams and Homolka. The Brief History link follows the developing Bernardo/Homolka case and the resulting trial band furor, from early press reports of the murders to Bernardo's conviction.

There are other books on the subject. One, a postmodern literary exercise, is Paul's Case by Lynn Crosbie. It's written as a series of letters from a young woman to an imprisoned Paul Bernardo. Another book is the first book actually published on the case, described in detail below. This page was originally just a review of that one book, back around 1994. The original version of the page is below, along with a couple of updates from years gone by.

Frank Davey's Karla's Web

Update, April 30, 2003 -- According to the Well's web server statistics logs, this page and the related pages are still being accessed regularly, years after I wrote them. In that time, this book has gone out of print, and the scandale du jour is Karla: A Pact With the Devil by Stephen Williams, who wrote the slightly less controversial book Invisible Darkness: The Horrifying Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. I have both of those books but have yet to read them. I was never interested in the crimes as such; I was more interested in what followed: the trial ban, the usenet newsgroup, the ways in which information about the trial spread in the early days of the Internet boom. If any book has been written that addresses those elements of the story well, I have yet to find it. 

Update, February 27, 1996 -- The following was written at a time when Paul Bernardo's conviction was still in the future, and when there were still occasionally intelligent discussions posted to the alt.fan.karla-homolka newsgroup. Since that time, Bernardo has been convicted. Two true crime books are now available for those who want to read more about Bernardo and Homolka and the trial. The Toronto Star's Nick Pron wrote Lethal Marriage, and the Toronto Sun's Cairns and Burnside wrote Deadly Innocence. I haven't yet read the latter, but the former doesn't discuss the Homolka trial ban and subsequent Usenet activity in any detail. Pron does, however, include transcripts of the videos Bernardo and Homolka had made of their crimes. The families of the victims are quite upset and claim that some of Pron's material is wrong. As I write, the courts are determining how to dispose of the tapes. Bernardo's lawyer wants them preserved, to allow for a possible appeal of his conviction, but the victims' families want them destroyed.

Bernardo and Homolka continue to pop up in the news occasionally. On November 3, 1995, Bernardo was found guilty of several rapes (in addition to the earlier finding of guilt for the rape and murder of Leslie Mahaffey and Kristin French) and was declared a "dangerous offender." In Canada's justice system, declaring someone a dangerous offender means imprisoning that person indefinitely.

There will be at least one more book about this case, a hardcover due out later this year by an American writer who is known for writing books that are more thoughtful than the usual true crime quickies. Whether anyone will be interested in buying a hardcover when inexpensive paperbacks are available remains to be seen. The trade paperback edition of Karla's Web doesn't seem to be selling any better than the original hardcover edition did.

For more background on all this, take a look at my brief history of Paul Bernardo, Karla Homolka, and alt.fan.karla-homolka.

Now, here's the review as it appeared here.

If you've never heard of alt.fan.karla-homolka, it's a newsgroup that was started a couple years ago to spread gossip and speculation about a notorious murder trial. Check out the Paul Teale/Karla Homolka Information Site for some background information. (2003 update: don't bother, it's long gone. But google will find plenty of alternatives.)

Homolka and Teale were both arrested for the murders of two teenaged girls. Teale has yet to be tried for his part in the murders, but Homolka was tried in 1993. What was originally another ugly, lurid murder case became something more when the judge issued a ban on information relating to Homolka's trial, which aroused a lot of curiosity and led to speculation that Homolka had perhaps made a deal with the prosecution in order to receive a lighter sentence. This curiosity led to the creation of alt.fan.karla-homolka by Justin Wells and Ken Chasse, and the rest is history.

Late last year, Frank Davey, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, wrote Karla's Web. Although he was the first to get his book into the bookstores (at least four more books on this case are in the works), he claimed to be doing something more serious than a mere true crime quickie. A cultural investigation... that was his goal. It was simply unfortunate circumstance that required the publisher to black out two percent of the text of the book to avoid releasing banned information, no doubt. The idea of including a registration card for the reader to send to the publisher, so the reader could be sent replacement pages following the lifting of the ban, was surely not meant as a marketing gimmick. (If it was, according to booksellers quoted in Canada's book industry paper Quill & Quire, it failed. The book reportedly sold poorly.)

A key chapter in Davey's book was devoted to alt.fan.karla-homolka. When I'd finished reading the book, I was less than impressed. So I wrote up a review of the relevant chapter for the relevant newsgroup. Here it is.

From: sjroby@netcom.com (Steve Roby)
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 19:06:01 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.fan.karla-homolka
Subject: a.f.k.h. in Davey's "Karla's Web"

Anyway, here's a look through the chapter.

We begin with a reproduction of the first page of the faq (version 2.1). Strangely enough, the header info indicates that it was emailed from anon.penet.fi to someone named jsmith@musica.mcgill.ca. IOW, it's not from afkh, at least not directly. And it's not addressed to [Davey's email address]. I may be making too much of this, but it suggests that Davey has no direct firsthand experience with AFKH... which is an impression the book does very little to deter.

Davey discusses Usenet and online database systems briefly, to explain to a wider audience how the online experience works. He makes the point that the whole AFKH affair was the first revelation for many Canadians that the information revolution has actually happened, while for others it was a taste of classical anarchism. Usenet and Internet were designed to continue around problems (remember that quote about how Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it? That's what he's getting at here). He also discusses netiquette: the idea that a code of behaviour has evolved that isn't enforced by a central authority. He says, "The overall result was a culture that had enormous pride in its own ability to devise solutions and to police itself." He calls it "fiercely anti-authoritarian."

He continues, "This emphasis on good citizenship reflects the long- standing utopian computer-culture view that a computer user can offer a new higher version of the ordinary citizen, one who is self-directing, self-disciplined, responsible, and able to function without the intrusive presence of authority. Again, this concept is more American than Canadian...." Actually, it sounds to me like a good definition of the difference between an adult and a child.

Davey then describes Usenet, Compuserve, and other online forums as out of control, and contends that they were deliberately designed that way. (Is this really a bad thing?) Freenets and other systems oriented to new users add an element of danger. There are new users who don't understand the culture that's developed online. There are people using pseudonyms and posting anonymously. Davey even throws in the classic Internetphobe hysteria of online pedophiles just before listing the well-known pseudonymous characters of AFKH, like Abdul, Neal the Trial Ban Breaker, and Lt. Starbuck.

A digression on the political ramifications of communications technology follows. Our modern technology, which allows us to communicate as easily with someone a continent away as with our next door neighbour, removes the importance of "place" from our lives. It threatens our culture as a country, if our "place" is a virtual community rather than a nation-state. Therefore, as an example, Canadian regulation of broadcasting is a good thing. It allows us to promote and preserve our Canadian culture and protect it from those among us who would be happy with American TV.

From here Davey wanders into a discussion of populism and individualism as political forces. He spends a couple of pages railing against free trade and likens those of us who read AFKH to cross-border shoppers. Next, he spends a page on the Charlottetown Accord. Our populist distrust of elites, he says, led us to reject A Good Thing. Just because the government, the political parties, and the media were in favour of the accord, we populist anti-elitists voted against it. He clearly believes that we were wrong to do so. (But then, quite a sizeable number of politicians and media supported free trade, which he opposes. His reasoning isn't entirely consistent.)

Next, the war on Amerikkka begins. Canadians are only upset about the trial ban because we are unfamiliar with our own justice system. The flood of American TV cop shows has educated us about the US justice system and left us ignorant of our own. "While technology has enabled much of the American domination of Canadian popular culture, it has also in the recent events of the Karla Homolka trial proven to have vastly empowered the resultant Americanized grassroots opinion in Canada, amplified the ability of the Americanized citizen to act individually, and even subverted the power of a national state." The last few words suggest that this is meant as a list of bad things. Acting as an individual is on a par with subverting our country. And globalization is not good.

Finally, nearly 30 pages into the chapter, Davey starts talking about the content of AFKH. "In its actual content... AFKH appeared to be much more voyeuristic than political." He talks about material posted by Abdul and Neal (this is where the blacked out sections become frequent), basically summarizing a lot of the claims in the FAQ. Oddly enough, though he condemns the voyeurism inherent in the FAQ, the uncensored edition of this book will be a voyeur's delight. All the juicy bits are here, as far as I can tell.

Next, Davey refutes Abdul's reasons for opposing the ban (again, taken from the FAQ) with a sentence or two each. I didn't find his arguments particularly convincing; he seems so certain that he is right that he doesn't need to prove it to anyone. The trial ban breakers on AFKH are simply enjoying a power they have, to defy the ban electronically. "But the power of AFKH was wasted, much like the power of many of the media, in voyeurism and self- congratulatory vanity. Rather than marshalling a philosophical challenge against the assumptions of Judge Kovacs and of the judicial system of which he was a part, the participants revelled in the supposed possession of forbidden facts, and imagined themselves undertaking a more exciting and important mission than they were."

Towards the end of the chapter, Davey profiles Paul Bernardo as a typical Generation Xer. Mentioning that Paul had a PC, Davey dives into wackyland.

"It [Paul's PC] had at best a marginal connection to his alleged smuggling activities which marked him as an independent and rebellious thinker, and possibly no connection to the anti- authoritarianism of AFKH, or to populist urgers of tax revolts like Douglas Davis -- who often cloak their potentially anti-democratic activities in pretences of democracy and civic service.

"There is little doubt that the person who took Leslie Mahaffy and Kristin French for his idiosyncratic pleasures was also a kind of self-administering entrepreneur, acting if not outside the rules of Canada Customs at least far outside democratically legislated Canadian criminal law. The legal system that Canadians hoped would catch and punish Mahaffy and French's killer is also the legal system that both killer and AFKH defied."

End of chapter.

So... there's no indication that Davey has ever read anything other than one version of the FAQ. No indication that Davey has ever contacted any of the key players in the AFKH saga, from Justin to Abdul. No indication, in short, that he knows what the hell he's talking about. And yet he feels free to casually class the readers and posters of AFKH with Paul Bernardo himself.

AFKH has had its share of morbid and gruesome rumours, but it has also had long, involved debates about the relative merits of the Canadian and American justice systems. It's had arguments between those who oppose the ban and those who support it. But you wouldn't know that from Davey's book. If you were unfamiliar with the Internet, you'd likely decide that AFKH was solely the province of immature gorehounds with no ideas of the principles involved. I disagree.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Davey has failed to communicate the AFKH experience to his readers because he has failed, to the best of my knowledge, to communicate with the readers and writers of this group. What he has communicated instead is a lot of leftwing anti-Americanism and anti-individualism, with more than a hint of hypocrisy. This is not the book I had hoped it would be. Let's hope that someone with a bit less of an ideological axe to grind will someday write a better "cultural investigation" of this whole business.

(Note: I've abbreviated alt.fan.karla-homolka throughout, but Davey uses alt.fan.karla-homolka, written in full. That should be the only inaccuracy in the quoted material.)

Steve

-- 
sjroby@netcom.com ae773@freenet.carleton.ca 76217.1455@compuserve.com
"Standing here like a loaded gun waiting to go off
I've got nothing to do but shoot my mouth off"
-- Black Flag describes the Usenet experience

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