Last Thursday, a reporter with La Presse caught Thierry Bordelais outside of his Chateauguay home and asked him what he made of his neighbours’ concerns about his family taking up residence in the Montreal suburb.

“If they are worried, all they have to do is move,” Bordelais said, visibly irritated according to La Presse. “We’re free, we’re in a free country.”

“Has anything happened over the past 10 years?” he continued. “So why are they worried? I don’t see why they are worried.”

One would expect the same sort of exasperated defence by a husband of his wife if, say, she downed a bottle of schnapps at the last neighbourhood barbecue and started uncouthly hitting on someone’s teenage son. But Bordelais’ wife, Karla Homolka (or Leanne Teale as she is now known) did a little bit more than embarrass herself in front of the neighbours when she helped her former husband, Paul Bernardo, drug and rape her own teenage sister and participate in the rape and murder of at least two other girls. Indeed, I think Bordelais’ neighbours can be forgiven if they’re not entirely over that yet.

What was striking in the exchange between Bordelais and La Presse was not merely its tone-deafness, however, but just how utterly normal it all seemed: Here was a guy, returning home to his wife and three kids, pissed off to find reporters waiting for him in his driveway. Eventually he would go inside, maybe get something to eat, talk to his kids about their days and go to sleep beside one of the most reviled serial killers in Canadian history. Just like he had done every day for the past seven years.

It’s not unusual to hear of violent criminals attracting the attention of “serial killer groupies,” as they are colloquially called, or what is classified by psychology texts as those with “hybristophilia,” a sexual attraction to people who have committed violent crimes. Hybristophilia tends to affect more women than men and, according to at least one school of thought, can be explained as a consequence of a woman’s evolutionary drive to seek out a partner who can physically protect her offspring. Female admirers have reached out to notorious serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez and, so too, have some male admirers, including one who recently propositioned Rohinie Bisesar, the 40-year-old woman accused in the stabbing death in Toronto’s underground PATH system last year.

Despite this particular psychological explanation, some “serial killer groupies” claim that their attraction to certain criminals is bred not because of his or her violent past, but despite it. In a documentary TV series produced and directed by Errol Morris, true crime writer Sondra London adopts that position in attempting to explain her attraction to the “Gainesville Ripper” Danny Rolling, with whom she had a relationship while he was behind bars. When pressed by the interviewer about why she’s attracted to serial killers, London shoots back, saying, flatly: “That’s a lame question.” But when asked “Why the attraction to Danny Rolling?” she responds: “That’s different” and goes on to describe Rolling’s many endearing qualities, as if she was talking about any normal guy who didn’t happen to tape his victims’ mouths shut, stab them until they bled to death and mutilate their corpses.

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There is no answer as to whether the greater aberrant mind is one that’s attracted to a violent murderer or one that can separate a person from his or her murderous acts. And, indeed, in the case of Thierry Bordelais and Karla Homolka, it’s impossible to say whether their relationship was borne from a hybristophilia-type of attraction or a phenomenal ability on the part of Bordelais to see the new “Leanne Teale” as a woman distinct from “Karla Homolka” — mostly because all the public really knows of the courtship is that the pair was connected through his sister Sylvie Bordelais, who was Homolka’s lawyer.

Plenty of observers have remarked that one of the great tragedies of the Homolka story will come when her children realize that their mother committed some of the most horrific acts humans can do to one another. But it’s worse than that; since once that initial shock has worn off (if such a thing is possible) those kids will inevitably start thinking of their father, and wonder just what’s wrong with him that he could fall in love, and marry, a monster. There’s no comfort in mom or dad.

National Post

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