Karla - A Pact with the Devil

In the early 1990s, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo became known around the world as the “Ken and Barbie Killers” after the young lovers were convicted of crimes related to the rape and murder of two teenage girls. Homolka later struck a deal with prosecutors to serve twelve years in prison for manslaughter. 

When she was released from prison in 2005, Homolka lived briefly in Montreal, where she was hounded by the press. By 2007, she had disappeared. Some said Homolka had changed her name and left Canada for Haiti, France, or the Czech Republic. Others said she was living in the Bahamas with a bisexual porn actor named Luka Magnotta. 

In the spring of 2012, investigative journalist Paula Todd embarked on a mission to find Homolka, knowing that other reporters around the country were doing the same. But Todd was certain she’d found where Canada’s most notorious female serial killer was hiding, trying to make a new life for herself. What she discovered was both unexpected and incredible – the woman who had killed three children now had three of her own.

The first ever account of crimes that continue to haunt Canada's conscience.

Nearly 30 years after Clifford Olson's horrific crimes and the controversial deal he made with authorities ($100,000 for showing the RCMP where the bodies of his 11 victims were buried) this is the first ever account of Olson's heinous crimes and an extensive account of his childhood life in and outside prison.

Based on Peter Worthington's extensive interviews with Olson when he was alive, as well as sealed documents which Worthington was granted permission to from Olson's lawyer, Robert D. Shantz, this book includes shocking and horrific descriptions that illustrate crimes Olson never showed remorse for and which gave rise to the victims of violence movement, led to an amendment of the Criminal Code barring multiple murders from applying for early parole under the faint-hope clause and the passage of Bill C-31 denying such payments to prisoners while they are incarcerated.

For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse.

For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation.

On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I don’t think of myself as a victim. I survived.

A Stolen Life is my story—in my own words, in my own way, exactly as I remember it.

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The pine cone is a symbol that represents the seed of a new beginning for me. To help facilitate new beginnings, with the support of animal-assisted therapy, the J A Y C Foundation provides support and services for the timely treatment of families recovering from abduction and the aftermath of traumatic experiences—families like my own who need to learn how to heal. In addition, the J A Y C Foundation hopes to facilitate awareness in schools about the important need to care for one another.

Our motto is “Just Ask Yourself to . . . Care!”

A portion of my proceeds from this memoir will be donated to The J A Y C Foundation Inc.

"In my 1998 book No Claim to Mercy, about the controversial murder conviction of Robert Baltovich, I devoted quite a few pages to the infamous crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka because there was a compelling case to be made that Bernardo was the man responsible for the disappearance of Elizabeth Bain, not Baltovich. At that time, a handful of books had been written about the Bernardo-Homolka case, but the best single piece of writing about the practically unfathomable dynamic that permitted the so-called “Ken and Barbie Killers” to commit such horrific crimes together was Patricia Pearson’s “Behind Every Successful Psychopath,” which was published in the October 1995 issue of the now defunct Saturday Night magazine. It deservedly won a National Magazine Award and other honours. In 2012, with Karla Homolka still in the news as a “free” woman, “Behind Every Successful Psychopath” remains an important work and is an excellent companion piece to Paula Todd’s just-released Finding Karla.”

Over the course of twenty-five years, Dr. Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man.Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has.

In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.

Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.

Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.