For the first time since his shocking transfer to a medium-security prison, sadistic murderer Paul Bernardo is seeking parole yet again.
Now housed in the cushy La Macaza Institution in rural Quebec, the serial rapist and killer of schoolgirls Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French is set to have his third parole hearing on the morning of Nov. 26.
There is no mercy for the families he has destroyed as he drags them through yet another bid at freedom.
“It seems that just as the ink had dried on our previous victim impact statement, Doug and I have to muster up the strength to prepare a second statement,” Donna French had said at Bernardo’s last parole hearing in 2021.
And now she must prepare a third.
Much has happened since the last time the notorious killer lost his audacious attempt at release: Kristen’s father died at the age of 92, the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear the families’ request to win access to his prison records — despite their being used by the parole board to make its decisions — and most shocking of all, Bernardo was quietly transferred out of maximum security in 2023.
The move sparked understandable outrage across the country. Most of us assumed it would be nothing but maximum security for someone declared a dangerous offender and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years for kidnapping, torturing and killing 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy in 1991 and 15-year-old Kristen French in 1992.
Bernardo was also found guilty of the manslaughter and sexual assault of his 15-year-old sister-in-law Tammy Homolka. He has also admitted to sexually assaulting 14 other women.
Since 1999, Bernardo had tried to get out of maximum, but his reclassification was overridden 13 times. In July 2022, he was considered successfully “integrated” with other inmates and was reclassified in February 2023 to medium security. His transfer to La Macaza, near Mont Tremblant, was approved a month later.
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But no one bothered to tell his victims’ families that after almost 30 years, their daughters’ remorseless killer was getting sprung from maximum. They were only told on the morning of May 29, 2023, just hours before Bernardo was on his merry way to the medium-security prison.
Just two years earlier, at his 2021 hearing, his parole officer told the board that Bernardo had made no progress since his first hearing in October 2018, and he remains a high-risk sex offender who isn’t a good candidate for community release.
Armed with a sheaf of papers, Bernardo offered a rambling, self-absorbed, jargon-filled, 30-minute soliloquy on why he was a changed man and yet so misunderstood.
After an hour of deliberation, the board turned him down. “Your understanding and insight remains limited, and as a result … you remain to be a high risk for sexual reoffending.”
Will he have a more sympathetic parole board this time around?