For the first time since his shocking transfer to medium security, 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.
“It feels like another exhumation, another violation, another loss,” Debbie Mahaffy told the board at that second hearing less than three years after the first. “What does resting in peace mean when we have to relive these horrors every two years or so for the rest of our lives?”
Much has happened since the last time the notorious killer failed in his delusional attempt at release: Kristen’s father Doug died in April at the age of 92, the Supreme Court refused to 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 from Millhaven sparked understandable outrage across the country. Most of us assumed he would live out the rest of his miserable days behind the bars of a maximum-security prison after he was 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 in 1991 and 15-year-old Kristen in 1992.
Bernardo was also found guilty of the manslaughter and sexual assault of his 15-year-old sister-in-law, Tammy Homolka, and has admitted raping 14 other women. If anyone seemed destined to be a lifer in maximum, it was the doughy former accountant.
Bernardo was nothing if not determined. He’d been trying to get out of a maximum-security prison since 1999, but his reclassification was overridden 13 times. In July 2022, though, he was suddenly considered successfully “integrated” with other inmates and reclassified in February 2023 to medium security.
His transfer to La Macaza, near Mont Tremblant, was approved a month later.
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 informed on the morning of May 29, 2023, just hours before Bernardo was on his merry way to the comfortable medium-security prison which is also home to cannibal killer Luka Magnotta and Tori Stafford’s slayer, Michael Rafferty.
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A review by Corrections Canada concluded the transfer decision was “sound” but should have been shared earlier with Bernardo’s victims.
More than a year has passed, the furor has died down, so of course it was time for the narcissistic psychopath to toy with his victims again and schedule another stab at parole.
At his 2021 hearing, his parole officer said Bernardo had made no progress since his first hearing in October 2018, and that he remained a high-risk sex offender.
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. “Without a doubt, (I’m) low risk because I’ve stopped all sexual deviant behaviour,” he proclaimed.
The reviled sex killer proposed moving to an Ontario halfway house to be closer to his elderly parents, but for the sake of his victims’ families, he’d consider B.C. where he was prepared to take any menial job, even picking fruit.
After deliberating less than an hour, Bernardo’s second parole bid was denied. “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? Will the third time be the charm?
That sounds crazy. But so was imagining that this monster would ever get out of maximum security.