The police folder read like a chronicle of sadistic insanity. The details of his eroticism and bestiality were so risqué that even the most outspoken Canadian newspapers felt they could not publish them.

He would come out of the shadows and grab her breasts from behind, pull her into a secluded spot and make her strip. Certain she was going to die, she would submit to vaginal intercourse, sodomy, and forced fellatio. After several organisms, he would vanish like a visitor from outer space.

Toronto and York Region was the locus of many rapes. Within a two-year period, the number of sexual assaults in this area had climbed to a baker’s dozen. After several months of quiet in 1988, the attacks on women began again. In an unprecedented interjurisdictional move, police in these two areas teamed up to find the one-man rape epidemic Canadian newspapers called, "The Scarborough Rapist."

On October 18, the rapist invaded a 22-year-old girl’s apartment on Gilbert and Eglinton Avenues and sexually assaulted her, while forcing her to relate in detail intimate questions about her sex life. On December 12 he came out of the shadows and grabbed a 14-year-old Richmond Hill girl who was waiting for a bus on the corner of Newkirk and Crosby Avenue. He dragged her behind a factory, assaulted her pitilessly, then disappeared as quickly as he had arrived. The ravaged teenager was treated at the hospital for gashes in her arms and hands, she received while attempting to ward off the lunatic attacking her.

A special police squad under the direction of Investigator Inspector Tony Warr was formed. "Criminals don’t know where boundaries are," he told reporters. He blamed the fact that the rapist had been able to elude a task force for so long on the fact that emotionally troubled women are so frightened that they fail to get a worthy description of their attacker. In the case of the 22-year-old and the 14-year-old the descriptions didn’t match, although the modus operandi did.

The October victim described him as approximately 25, 5-foot-7, with short blonde hair and a black goatee, while the December victim depicted him as between 18 and 20 years old, 5-foot-10, with short-cropped brown hair. Not even close.

A telephone hot-line was set up for people who had information. Meanwhile, police rousted known sex offenders, staked out likely sites in unmarked cars and relocated decoys along darkish streets.

One victim told police that while he was raping her, a female accomplice videotaped the entire sex act while yelling encouragement to the rapist. Investigators discounted this testimony and chalked it up to hysteria on the part of the young woman who was raped.

It was Friday night, June 14, 1991, and Leslie Mahaffy went out for the evening with a few friends. Ever since chilling reports of a mad rapist appeared in the press, her parents had imposed a strict curfew of 10 p.m. But Leslie was an independent girl with a mind of her own. Still in high school, she ignored the ground rules set up by her parents, skipped school, and engaged in promiscuous sex. Behind her back, neighborhood studs called her "easy."

Leslie’s parents anticipated that she would stay out until after curfew, and they decided to teach her a lesson. When she arrived home at after 2 a.m., she found she had been locked out. She called a girlfriend and asked if she could spend the night, but her girlfriend’s mother told her to go home. With nowhere else to go, Leslie decided to return to her house and see if there was a way of breaking in, without arousing her family.

At the very same time, the Scarborough Rapist was prowling the streets looking for license plates to steal.

When he wasn’t preying upon unsuspecting women he was smuggling cigarettes across the border and he needed bogus tags to disguise his frequent visits across the American-Canadian line. He was crouched behind a car when Leslie came walking by. Brandishing a hunting knife, he forced her into his car. He drove her to his house, undressed her, blindfolded her, and videotaped her naked. He was going to have vaginal intercourse with Leslie but he ejaculated prematurely.

When his wife woke up, he gave her instructions on how he wanted her to have sex with Leslie while he videotaped them. This done, he instructed his obedient wife to film him while he sodomized Leslie. The brute force of his anal penetration caused Leslie to cry.

In the late evening of June 29, 1991, a middle-aged couple were canoeing down Lake Gibson when they spotted a concrete block with bits of animal flesh protruding from several cracks. With the help of some fishermen who were standing on the bank, the block was retrieved. Using a tire iron as a crowbar, they split the concrete, but they were hardly prepared for the sight that met their eyes -- the calf and foot of a young female -- crawling with maggots.

A hasty call was placed to headquarters to summon detectives and other homicide probers who immediately began searching the murky waters for additional parts of the victim. They found a total of five concrete blocks that contained body parts. Police surmised that whoever had dumped the blocks in the shallow waters of Lake Gibson could not have been familiar with the area. Had he dumped the blocks from the bridge where the deep waters were, his crime might have remained a secret forever.

Much of it was the routine gathering of physical evidence that is undertaken at every scene of a violent crime. But the really valuable evidence was the distinctive braces that provided positive clues to Leslie’s identity.

Kristen French was a beautiful girl with a doll-like figure. On April 16, 1992, she was abducted the parking lot of a church she was attending. A woman lured the lovely brunette over to her car on the pretense of asking directions. A man brandishing a knife approached Kristen from behind and she forced to accompany the kidnapper team.

Throughout the night, the dispatcher relayed information about the missing woman to all patrol units.

The rapist and his wife had no intention of letting Kristen live because she knew them, knew where they lived, and knew their dog by name. Regardless, the rapist didn’t want Kristen to realize this, specially since she was bigger and stronger than his wife and could have easily overpowered her in a fight. Knowing her life was in danger, Kristen went along with anything they suggested, even pretending to enjoy perverted sex with both her male and female captors. The more she pretended to enjoy it, the more perverse her captors became.

Kristen did not even resist when the man urinated on her. "Don’t make me mad. Don’t make me hurt you," he said as he rubbed his groin into her face. Her sexual assault was all but intolerable.

Kristen endured the indignities for two days as the rapist’s wife videotaped everything under the direction of her husband.

April 30, 1992, something happened that made her missing-person report superfluous. Kristen was found in a ditch, dead and naked. Since her body had not been dismembered, police had no reason to suspect the two murders were connected.

The following month Teri Anderson, who had been missing since November, was found by fishermen in Lake Ontario, half eaten by fishes. She had been an excellent student and very popular with her classmates, and, police could find no known flaw in her character.

So it was surprising when the autopsy came back in triplicate, the contents denting the armor of innocence Teri had always attempted to wear. Teri, the coroner said, accidentally drowned after drinking beer and taking LSD. People who knew her intimately, denied she drank or took drugs. Was this yet another of the myriad crimes committed by the Scarborough Rapist, police wondered.

The puzzling task of finding the Scarborough Rapist fell to Detective Constable Steve Irwin of Toronto’s Metropolitan Police, one of Canada’s most distinguished and canny inspectors. It was the meeting of two classic symbols -- the hunter and the hunted -- one obviously the worst kind of pervert -- the other a stalker, pursuing his quarry with patience and determination. >From here, the case took on the aspect of a veritable game of chess.

Shrewd detective work with uncanny good luck took Irwin back to a 1987 rape case where the young victim had given a very definite description of her attacker. He was handsome, six-feet tall, smooth-skinned and had round face and "Creepy-eyes." An identi-kit drawing made by a police artist, oddly enough, was never made public.

The inspector went into the file and read a complaint from one of this man’s former girlfriends who accused him of raping, sodomizing, and physically assaulting her. There were coincidences in the rape case that raised an eyebrow on the detective. The man accused of raping her in the backseat of his white Capri was named Paul Bernardo. Several of the rape victims said their attacker drove off in a white Capri. Paul lived in the same area where the rapes were committed. Irwin noticed that the girl’s complaint was never followed up.

In the wake of this information, Irwin contacted the media and had them publish the Identi-kit drawing of the rapist after several of his victims had agreed that the drawing resembled their attacker. To lure him out, a $150,000 reward was offered. These wild cards were enough to win all the chips.

By now, Paul had quit his job with Price Waterhouse to devote his time entirely to his cigarette-smuggling operation, which was paying handsomely. A couple of his former colleagues, having an afterlunch drink at a country inn couldn’t get over how much the newspaper picture remembered Paul. One of these men contacted the police. A cashier at the bank where Paul had an account, also noticed that how much her customer looked like the picture in the newspaper.

However, the reward had ignited a flood-tide of tips and busy police didn’t have the manpower to check either of these tips out.

The more Irwin pondered the old 1988 file, the more he became convinced that he should have a talk with Paul Bernardo. He found Paul very cooperative and Bernardo didn’t strike him as the kind who could be a serial rapist. But detectives are a suspicious lot, and Irwin nevertheless took blood, saliva and hair samples from Paul before he left the house. In the morning, he carried them to Kim Johnston, at the forensic laboratory.

Paul’s semen samples were matched with 230 samples from other suspects. Only 5 of the 230 samples fit the blood factors of the Scarborough Rapist. Paul Bernardo was one of those five. The noose was tightening.

Descriptions of the murderer and the semen samples left little doubt in the mind of Irwin that Paul was his man, however, his superiors pulled him off the case and assigned him to cases with more urgency. The rapes by now had mysteriously stopped, and the Scarborough Rapist case was put in the "cold" file.

Paul and Karla Homolka had decided to move their modus operandi to St. Catherine, in the Niagara Falls area. Following the death of Kristen French, authorities in Ontario formed the Green Ribbon Task Force with Superintendent Vincent Bevan as lead investigator. Base of operations were established in St. Catherine. American FBI forensic scientists worked in conjunction with the Canadian government in an effort to ferret out the rapist and quell near hysteria that had many citizens barricading themselves in their houses.

With the composite sketch of the rapist in every post office and frequently flashed on television, police began receiving more and more calls about a man named Paul Bernardo who resembled the picture. Detectives who interviewed him at his 57 Bayview home noticed he was clean-cut, handsome, and very polite and cooperative. Yes, he said, it was rather inconvenient and embarrassing that he looked like the Identi-kit drawing. They noticed the car in his driveway was a Nissan, which looked nothing like a Capri.

Consequently, Paul was not pursued as a suspect.

By February of 1993, the Scarborough Rapist had raped more women and had murdered several teen girls. Police were no closer to catching him.

There’s an old adage that says: All women love brutal men -- if they are kind to her. Paul’s videotaping wife, called the police and charged him with assault and battery. Using Karla as a punching bag proved to be Paul’s fatal mistake.

The physical abuse had been going on for years, but this time he blacked both her eyes, knocked out several teeth, and kicked her ribs in. The Niagara police investigated the matter and took Karla to the hospital. Toronto detectives interviewed her at length. From there, more and more the pieces of the rapidly materializing jigsaw puzzle depicting Paul Bernardo as the serial killer were falling into place.

When Karla’s favorite uncle arrived at the hospital she whispered to him that Paul was the Scarborough Rapist who had killed Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.

Karla’s uncle suggested she get herself a good lawyer. As a veterinary assistant, Karla had taken care of Lawyer George Walker’s Dalmation. With an unobstructed view of Karla’s connection in the murder horror, Walker told her frankly that he didn’t know what negotiations could be made for her cooperation in view of her involvement. Karla balked. She wanted some kind of immunity if she was to tell all she knew.

With Paul’s arrest on February 10, the case picked up renewed momentum. He was charged with the Scarborough rapes and the murders of Mahaffy and French, labeling him as a homicidal maniac. As police doggedness continued, Karla became afraid. She sat watching television bulletins about the murders, and, in complete confusion, gulped enough anxiety pills and alcohol to knock out a horse.

On February 19, police obtained a search warrant. For 71 days they combed the couple’s Port Dalhousie home. They were flabbergasted to find a complete directory of all the rapes and murders written in Paul’s own handwriting. As if this wasn’t damning enough, the indefatigable Inspector Irwin found books on perverted sex and magazine stories on serial killers. What they didn’t find were perverted videotapes that were not surrendered to police until Paul’s lawyer, Murray withdrew from the case.

The videotapes showed Karla heavily involved in lascivious sex acts with two captives. The evidence of his own eyes assured Karla’s lawyer that she was an enthusiastic partner in the crimes. It was barely a week later that lawyers on both sides came to terms. Karla would get twelve years in penal servitude for each of the two victims. The sentences would served concurrently.

It had to be done, prosecutors said. Without Karla’s testimony the true story might never be known. As part of the plea-bargain, the attorney general agreed to use his influence to see that Karla served her time in a psychiatric hospital instead of a maximum security penitentiary. An unimpressed newspaper editor said it was probably the worst deal that the Canadian government had ever made with a criminal witness.

Karla agreed unconditionally to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the Scarborough rape and murder spree.

Karla’s trial began admix a carnival atmosphere on June 28, 1993. The junior miss tartan kilt and blazer she wore clashed heavily with the ruby-red lipstick, false eyelashes, and alamode of makeup. To set the scene for a plea-bargain deal, the defense called a psychiatrist, who told the court Karla knew what was happening but felt helpless and unable to act in her own defense or the defense of the victims. "She was in my opinion paralyzed with fear and in that state became obedient and self-serving," he told the court.

Her guilty plea, her age, her lack of criminal record were probably the mitigating factors that helped her escaped the maxim punishment allowed by law and readied herself for what was sure to be a nightmare -- the trial of her husband Paul Bernardo, soi-disant, The Scarborough Rapist.

The delay of the trial for two years not only stirred the deepest wrath among the victim’s families and friends but also upset the keenest senses of officers involved in the case. For one thing, Bernardo had given his lawyer, Ken Murray, the videotapes showing a curious episode of sex attacks filmed by Paul and Kara. He believed, by doing so, he would keep the films out of the hands of the prosecution. But prosecutors wiretapped conversations between Bernardo and Murray, and the lawyer was forced to turn the tapes over. He excused himself from the case and John Rosen became Paul’s mouthpiece.

During the one-year delay since the start of the trial, newspapers gathered and published an interesting dossier on Paul Bernardo.

Kenneth Bernardo and Marilyn married in 1960 and moved into a quiet middle-class home in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. The marriage was doomed from the start, Kenneth abused his wife and prowled the streets at night, peeping into windows of neighborhood women. When Marilyn caught her husband fondling their infant daughter she seeked harborage in the arms of a former lover. Paul was conceived illegitimately.

As Paul matured he became enthralled with scouting and looked "cute" in his uniform. He worked summer vacations as a counselor and became very popular with the girls in his neighborhood. He was described as well-mannered, polite, and an excellent student. He was voted the most popular boy in school. Girls who had sex with him in high school said he was a gentle and thoughtful lover. The dossier also reflected his good head for figures and a predicted future as a successful businessman.

The Devil stepped into Paul’s life when he became sixteen. He and his mother got into an argument and she told him he was a bastard child with no ligament name. Since that day, when she wanted him she would call, "come here, bastard. Or "breakfast is ready, bastard." In turn he called her a "fat slob" and a "whore." The house of cards collapsed under the strain. Paul moved out and took to the streets. He began hanging out with gang boys and developed a macho attitude.

Women in particular, became the target of his animosity.

As Paul grew into manhood he continued to use his Valentino looks and persuasive ways to seduce girls he met in bars. To him, getting a girl into bed was as easy as pie. By the time he enrolled at the University of Toronto regular sex had become a bore. Forceful anal sex became his sexual fantasy and he found plenty of submissive women. Detectives pushing deeper into his background discovered that Paul enjoyed humiliating women: after having sex with them he urinated on them and beat them up.

His appetite for kinky sex could not be supported by a normal job. He started trafficking in stolen goods while still in college. After he graduated he obtained a position as a junior accountant for the prestigious firm of Price Waterhouse. By now his reputation as a sicko-lover had spread among his female associates. They crossed the street when they saw him coming.

Desperate for sex, he scoured neighborhood bars until he met the girl of his dreams in October of 1987. Karla Homolka was a pretty blonde with an hour-glass figure and an open mind for sex.

Whereas his former lovers found his sadistic sexual behavior unpleasant, Karla got off on it. Karla, handcuffed and on her knees begged to be humiliated and the degradation knew no bounds. He placed a dog’s choke collar around her neck and rammed a wire bottle into her vagina. To further satisfy his sexual fantasies, he strangled her with a cord until her face turned blue and she passed out. His pet names for her were slut, bitch, whore and cunt.

They played games; he pretended to be a rapist sneaking into her bedroom and forcing her to have anal and oral sex with him. Over pillow talk one night he suggested that they really commit a rape. "Cool," she said.

Karla’s testimony was the ammunition the prosecution needed to shoot Paul down in flames during his May 1995 trial in Judge Patrick LeSage’s Toronto courtroom. The accused man faced two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of forcible confinement, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of performing an indignity on a human body.

He plead not guilty.

There were gasps of astonishment, disgust, even outrage when prosecutor Ray Houlahan rolled a videotape of Karla naked in bed, masturbating with a bullet-shaped end of a flashlight inserted into her vagina. Few people were expecting to see a pornography tape of the country’s most infamous women involved in various sex acts and positions even the most experienced prostitute couldn’t have dreamed up. It was Houlahan’s way of showing the court how Bernardo forced his will on a woman who would do anything for him -- even kill her own sister.

Karla’s testimony portrayed her apparently consensual demeanor on the tapes as an act meant to appease her violent and dangerous husband out of fear for her own life. You could hear a pin drop in the courtroom as she told how she helped drug and rape her 15-year-old sister, Tammy. It happened in December of 1990.

What caused Karla to commit such an unspeakable crime? She explained to the court that Paul was very upset when he discovered she was not a virgin the first time they had sex. It was therefore, her responsibility to make it possible for him to take the virginity of her pretty younger sister Tammy. It would have to be videotaped without Tammy’s knowing anything about it. Kara decided to give her sister to Paul as a Christmas present.

In order to wrought brutality on her kid sister, Kara turned to her profession as a veterinary assistant with the knowledge of sedatives used for animals. Her knowledge, however, was limited to how much to use to render Tammy unconscious so Paul could take her virginity. She decided on halothane, an anesthetic animals breathe in before an operation.

They planned out the rape, methodically, right down to Karla holding the halothane-cloth over Tammy’s nose. The sedation of Tammy involved a certain risk without the proper equipment. Karla would make sure her sister had air enough to breath and would check her condition throughout the rape.

On December 23, 1990, the machinery was set in motion for Tammy’s deflowering. At a family gathering Paul used his new video camcorder to take movies of Mr. and Mrs. Homolka, their daughters, Kara, Tammy and Lori, and the Christmas tree. When the other members of the household retired for the night, Paul fed Tammy screwdrivers laced with Halcion until she passed out on the couch.

Kara immediately started undressing her little sister, even remarking how pointed her budding breasts were. Paul set the camera into position while he penetrated Tammy. Karla kept the halothane-laden cloth over Tammy’s nose and mouth. After he had ejaculated, Paul ordered Karla to perform cunnilingus on her sister.

She was doing this when Tammy suddenly began choking in her own vomit. Karla reverted back to her experience at the veterinary clinic. She held her sister upside down in an effort to clear her throat. Poor Tammy went into a coma and never regained consciousness.

Certainly it was a rape of maniacal magnitude. Their efforts to revive Tammy having failed, they dressed her, hid the camera and phoned an ambulance. Even paramedics armed with a portable breathalyzer could not bring Tammy back to life. Tammy’s parents, who had been awakened by the commotion in the living room, agreed with authorities that Tammy had too much to drink and drowned in her own vomit.

That was the first Karla’s family knew what had happened to Tammy. They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Tears flowed like rain while Karla tried to convince the court that Paul used Tammy’s death to blackmail her into helping him fulfill his sexual phantasms.

Prosecutors ascertained that Karla had smothered her sister with a pillow and choked French to death with a cord during a botched escape attempt.

Karla was convicted in 1993 of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Her possible released date is June of 2001, much to the disdain of the families of the victims who unsuccessfully tried to keep the tapes of their daughter’s rapes from being viewed in court.

Paul Bernardo was sentenced to life in prison, under a "dangerous offender" classification that meant he should never get out.

But it was not yet over.

Bernardo’s attorneys went to work seeking an appeal on the grounds that Judge LeSage made several important errors in law when he made his original charge to the jury in 1995. The appeal focused primarily on whether the jury was given the necessary instructions to make accurate assessment of the character of Karla Homolka. The failure to inform the jury was a "fatal mistake" in the charge, defense lawyer Tony Bryant said, because Karla’s testimony was the main evidence convicted Bernardo.

"The issue in this case was which of these two was the actual killer," said Bryant.

The case was finally put to rest on March 28, 2000 after a three-judge panel, unmoved by a series of arguments on alleged blunders by Judge LeSage, dismissed Bernardo’s appeal of his 1995 murder conviction. Bernardo’s attorneys say there will be no more appeals.

This was the last outpost. And Paul Bernardo was left alone, there.