Ontario Hansard - 18-June 1991
Last week was a week of mourning in Burlington. Last Tuesday, Christopher Evans, John Newby, Jodi Robins and Scott Grenier were all killed when their car went out of control on 1 Side road between Guelph Line and Walker's Line. Two days later, Carly MacNeil was killed and four others injured in a similar accident near Milton.
The road was a popular spot for “joy riding,” said residents and friends of the teens.
Regional police Staff Sg Peter Whittaker said police have never tagged the strip as a problem area for drag racing or speeding.
"Everybody's afraid they're going to lose their best friend next," says Paul Bernier, 17, who knew all five of the deceased. "It keeps going through your mind: 'Who's next?'
Leslie Mahaffy told Karla Homolka her name, and she said she wanted to leave so she could attend her friend Chris Evans’ funeral. They discussed his death, and Karla seemed interested. She asked for more details about the accident, having read some of it in the papers.
(Source: A Marriage Made For Murder by author Brian O’ Neill)
(Bernardo may have been hanging around the 'memorial service' that Mahaffy was attending, knowing that there would be young girls in attendance. He might have even been stalking the funeral home where the dead teens were.)
As the news from St. Catherines filtered down to the general public, tipsters called police with reports of suspicious vehicles. Apparently a brown van had slowly followed a girl on Cecil Drive; its driver had been looking at the girl the entire time. Police were most interested in reports of a blue van with white wing mirrors that had been spotted three times that afternoon, once at Holy Cross High School, once at Orchard Park School, and another time between the two schools. Other rumors had been linked the unsolved Terri Anderson's disappearance with a blue van as well.
Some schools in north St. Catherines recently sent home a note to parents warning them that a blue van or car might be cruising the area. The note stated that occupants of this vehicle may be trying to entice children inside, said Terry Robins, who received one of the notes.
Leslie Mahaffy was from Burlington and was last seen in that city, her concrete-encased body parts were found in Lake Gibson on the outskirts of St. Catharines, just a few miles from where Kristen was apparently abducted.
Kristen French's nude body was found on April 30 (Walpurgisnacht/Beltane), 1992, in a ditch several kilometres away on Side Road 1 in Burlington, about 45 minutes from St. Catharines and a short distance from the cemetery where Mahaffy is buried.
Other strange incidents on #1 Side Road:
Another man driving his pick-up truck down the street exactly one year to the date (June 11th) at night, when his truck burst into flames, he swerved off the road into the ditch and was killed as he hit a tree and was thrown through the windshield. The father of the one teenager who died in the burning car committed suicide in the same spot his son died 5 years to the date.
Another odd thing about the road is that all the trees along the road seem to be dead, all the trees in the nearby forests are alive and healthy.
One old blog, which I can’t find anymore, found out the street was originally a driveway for a farmer who owned all the property in the 1800's. The farmer was accused of killing his wife and daughter, they found the body of his wife but still to this day never found the body of the daughter. The farmer was convicted and was hung in the nearby town of Milton. Many people later claimed that the body of the daughter was buried under the road.
Could this be the work of an ancient cult in the area?
Be aware that Terri Anderson's missing case was also long-rumored to be linked to the Bernardo/Homolka killings as was Nina Devillier.
https://murderpedia.org/male.Y/y/yeo-jonathan.htm
Denizens of doughnut shops and bars couldn't resist the temptation to link the Kristen French case with a dozen other cases of missing girls or unsolved murders. One unsolved murder stood out in particular: University of Western Ontario student Lynda Shaw, twenty-one, was bludgeoned to death and her body set on fire after she was abducted late at night on Highway 401 while returning from her home in Brampton to her student residence. Her abandoned car was found on the highway shoulder with an emergency tire. One theory was that someone had tampered with the tires's air valve when Lynda stopped at a service center just west of the town of Woodstock.
The date was startling: Lynda Shaw was killed on April 16, 1990.
The_Sun_Times_Sat__Dec_7__1991
The_Whig_Standard_Mon__Sep_23__1991
The_Windsor_Star_Sat__Jun_20__1992
Serial killer Paul Bernardo no longer blames his wife.
Now he blames his parents.
Now, for the first time, he says he forced Homolka to take part.
In written submissions to his unsuccessful Parole Board of Canada hearing last month, the country’s most reviled dangerous offender addressed his long-held position that Homolka was his equal accomplice.
“You say that she was in fact to blame for some events but you admit that you victimized her and that she would not have offended if not for you, that you ruined her life,” the board said in its written decision released last week.
“To your credit, you also now take more ownership over some aspects of your criminal offending, now accepting that you were violent in multiple intimate partner relationships versus just one and that you committed the murders versus blaming them on your then-wife.”
In his ever shifting blame-game, Bernardo, 60, now says the “torture” and “sadism” his deceased parents inflicted upon him is the cause of his abductions and murders, and the rapes of at least 24 girls and women, ranging in age from 14 to 23.
He said his mother was raped as a child and that led him to want to be a rapist.
He also said his father sexually preyed on Bernardo’s sibling.
His parents died in 2022. This was his first hearing since then.
Decades ago, according to the board, Bernardo described growing up in a “prosocial family,” but over time he began to paint a different picture. He said his mother was “eccentric and controlling.”
“According to you, your parents tended to blame others for their problems, and they used other people to feel better; you adopted similar behaviours growing up,” wrote the board.
According to Bernardo, his mother was his “only source of love and affection.”
At 15, he learned he was the son of his mother’s lover. His mother refused to discuss it and left the family to be with her lover. His father rejected him.
When the affair ended, his mother returned home.
“She gained weight, presented with a dysphasia mood, and rarely left the basement,” the board cited from Bernardo. “She could yell for any reason.”
Bernardo called himself “a very bad bastard in a house of shame, blame and emotional neglect.”
The board challenged Bernardo’s new version of his upbringing.
“In written submissions to the board in preparation for this hearing, you described your treatment by your parents as far worse than what had been previously described in your file … You say you were ‘punished, degraded, tortured, humiliated, ridiculed, crushed, rejected, abandoned and discarded’ by them.”
Bernardo told the board his mother was raped by numerous men in her childhood, but she didn’t want that to become public. So he waited until her death to explain that it was her history of trauma that led him to commit his own rapes.
“You hated your mother’s sexual abusers,” the board cited. “You hated the world for what these men did to your mother … You acted out what your mother went through on the victims: sexual abuse because your mother was sexually abused.”
The board noted Bernardo’s “revenge theory” is “incoherent.”
Only after being pushed during his hearing did Bernardo concede he is also a sexual sadist who felt “happiness, powerful and sexually aroused” by hurting others, according to the board decision.
In the past, Bernardo described his father as “passive” with an “anxious and solitary temperament and emotional shortcomings.” He “could be verbally abusive and throw objects out of anger.”
During the time his mother left the family, Bernardo says his father “turned to voyeurism and sexual abuse” of one of Bernardo’s siblings. The parole board says his father was convicted of such an offence in 1992.
Bernardo spent 32 years in solitary confinement at a maximum-security prison.
At some point, Bernardo reconciled with his parents. For years, they were his only visitors.
Now that they are gone, they are the convenient cause of all his problems.
(Source: https://archive.is/p7YtL)