Next week in Woodstock, we’ll witness the sentencing of serial killer Elizabeth Wettlaufer, a nurse who has confessed to murdering eight elderly patients, and who’d told several people she was terrified by her own behaviour — none of whom notified the authorities. One of those people reportedly told her, “If you do it again, I will call the police.”
If you do it again?
Either they didn't believe her, or they had such low esteem for her aged victims that helping bring her to justice didn't strike them as a relevant step. I'm guessing it was the former that kept them silent.
Earlier this month, it came to light that Karla Homolka (a.k.a. Leanne Teale) had been volunteering on field trips at a private school in Montreal. Homolka, recall, not only participated in the abduction, rape, murder, and dismemberment of two adolescent southern Ontario girls in the early 1990s, but also drugged her younger sister for fiancé Paul Bernardo to rape — all of which makes it tough to take in news that she's become a mom who shows children how to knit. This is uncharted territory for Canadian society, and it’s the criminal justice system that’s landed us here.
Never before has a convicted serial killer been freed to wander about the neighbourhood. We have no precedent. How can Homolka be an engaged and empathetic mother, given what she did to her little sister? There is no evidence of moral struggle, or public reconciliation. She has never publicly acknowledged the traumatizing effect she had on all of Canada in the summer of 1995 during Bernardo’s trial. She is a Hollow Woman, drifting through the shadows, a wraith. She wants us to forget about her, without conceding that we cannot. She throws it back upon us, as our problem.
In November 2005, Quebec Superior Court Justice James Brunton removed all 14 conditions on Homolka’s release, including one that stipulated she stay away from children. One of Canada’s most prominent forensic psychiatrists, John Bradford, who’d watched the infamous videotapes Homolka and Bernardo made of their crimes, had warned in media interviews that she could hardly be considered benign.
Another psychiatrist, Bertrand Major, had submitted a report to the Joliette Institution for Women, where Homolka had been incarcerated, asserting that Homolka was still just as self-serving as he believed she had been when she ostensibly forgot to tell police and prosecutorial officials about her participation in the sexual assault of another victim, known as Jane Doe.
But the prison psychiatrists on whose reports Brunton leaned in making his decision generally downplayed the threat Homolka posed (while conceding that she continued to exhibit “moral vacuity”). It’s part of a long history of doctors and judges underestimating women’s capacity to do harm.
At the time of Homolka’s release there wasn’t enough credible research about female sex offenders on which to base an assessment — not because such crimes are too rare, but because sex-abuse victims often don’t press charges. Since 2005, at least two studies have found that women who co-offend with male partners “subsequently engage in solo offending,” according to University of Montreal criminologist Franca Cortoni, who also points out that “two-thirds of females commit their sexual offences on their own.” Cortoni and her colleagues’ 2016 analysis of police records and victimization surveys in 12 countries, including Canada, found that women commit six times the number of sex offences that appear in criminal justice statistics.
Who are their victims? Often their children or stepchildren, or students under their guardianship. Doctoral research by Andrea Darling of Durham University into women’s sexual offences in institutional settings found that the perpetrators were not young teachers who’d “fallen in love” with their adolescent male students; rather, they were older women who knew perfectly well what the boundaries were and crossed them anyway.
The trauma female sexual abusers inflict, Darling says, is just as profound and lasting as that inflicted by men. By minimizing the threat female perpetrators pose, we do their victims an injustice. Wettlaufer’s victims were left in harm’s way because no one would take her claims seriously. People also lost their lives to Nova Scotia’s Melissa Ann Shepard, imprisoned for trying to murder her husband Fred Weeks, and released in the spring of 2016; she’d previously served six years for manslaughter, having drugged her husband Gordon Stewart, hauled him to an isolated road in Halifax, and run him over with her car. That serial female violence is unusual relative to serial male violence is no reason to be blind to its prospect.
When these crimes do occur, we need to afford them their moral gravity, and not engage in what criminologists call “chivalry justice.” Responding to Homolka’s volunteering, federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair said Homolka had “paid her debt” to society. “If you're ensuring the safety of the kids, beyond our revulsion at the horror of the crime, is there any room for atonement and forgiveness?” he asked.
The real question is whether Mulcair would have asked that had Bernardo been found teaching yoga to grade-schoolers, or Robert Picton been volunteering on a farm. The answer, of course, is no.
Patricia Pearson is a Toronto journalist. Her 1998 book When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away With Murder addressed how difficult it is for people to perceive the threat posed by violent women.
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