How Paula Todd found Karla Homolka and got her photograph: Macleans

It was clear to Paula Todd that Karla Homolka had her guard up, so she brought up what she thought would be a less confrontational topic. But as Todd describes in her recent ebook, Homolka was icy to even the assertion that she appeared to be an excellent mother.

“Who challenges a compliment about good mothering?” Todd asked in her ebook, Finding Karla: How I Tracked Down an Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered a Mother of Three.  

A feature in the latest issue of Macleans lays out how Todd found Homolka in the rural setting of Guadeloupe and how her photographer camped on a neighbour’s goat farm for four days in order to get a shot of Paul Bernardo’s convinced partner in crime.

Todd told Macleans that Homolka didn’t have a very deep tan, which was unusual for living on a Carribean island. It would be difficult to get a photograph of Homolka if she rarely went outside, Todd realized. She brought former Life photographer Zoran Milich down to get the shot. As he told Macleans:

As these goats continued to nip at Milich, he trained his camera, equipped with a 600-mm-equivalent lens, through thick foliage toward the veranda, perhaps as far as two city blocks away. Temperatures soared to 40° C, the humidity was oppressive, the bugs fierce.  … “All of a sudden, here’s the miracle: a light wind blows just enough to do this,” and Milich demonstrates by parting his fingers in just the way the leaves parted to reveal Homolka reaching for her child. Milich unleashed a barrage of exposures, the shutter firing.

Check out the full account of how Paula Todd got the story of the whereabouts of Karla Homolka over at Macleans.ca.