Re: [OT] Brilliant police work

On Fri, 10 May 2024 00:40:26 -0700
The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:

On Thu, 9 May 2024 18:46:06 -0400, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
 

A truck driver from Newfoundland was making a run to Ontario, stopped
for fuel, and then went missing. The OPP (equivalent to the state
police in a US state) made an extensive search for him but came up
empty. Someone drove the abandoned truck back to Newfoundland. Only
then was the trucker found - in the trailer of his own truck!
>
The journalist who appears in the video actually asks the key
question: Did police even look in the back of his truck and if they
did, how did they fail to see him? (And, of course, if they didn't
look in the trailer, WHY NOT?)
>
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.4220495
>
Whoever organized the search for this guy really needs to take a
serious rip for this fiasco and, if he/sh e keeps their job, needs to
re-take the "search for missing people" course again. 

 
This is a repeat from a critical blunder made by police during the
Bernardo investigation some 30 years ago.
 
This was an Ontario case some 30 years ago where two young women were
raped and murdered by Paul Bernardo with help from his then girlfriend
Karla Homolka. In addition to the two murder victims Bernardo and
Homulka drugged Homulka's sister, Bernardo then raped the sister while
Homulka captured the whole thing on video.
 
The two of them then left Homulka's house leaving the unconscious
sister who as the drugs wore off started moving about while still
semi-conscious, barfed and choked on her own vomit - and suffocated.
 
When the police searched Homulka's house the search team included an
officer who had just transferred from the drug squad to homicide -
they had gotten a tip saying the rape of Homulka's sister had been
videoed so they tried to find the tape. In the end they didn't find
the tape which Homulka told them (among other things) the location of
the hidden tape in return for a plea bargain for manslaughter and was
given a 12 year term (and was released after a lesser period which I
forget) The former drug officer had pleaded with his sergeant to let
him search what he considered the standard hiding place for drug
searches but was told to be silent. This turned out to be where based
on Homulka's information (which she had provided as part of her plea
bargain).
 
The officer told this story after he retired from the Ontario
Provincial Police saying that if his sergeant had let him search they
would have found the tape and avoided the plea bargain with Homulka.
 
Bernardo remains in jail serving his life sentence - and the case was
shocking enough that this will surely be a life sentence that will
never result in parole - and the officer was convinced that minus the
plea bargain Homulka would have gotten the same sentence.
 
I'm pretty sure Rhino will agree this particular case was THE most
shocking case of the late 80s/early 90s in Canada.
 

There was some really unfortunate police work done during this case.
First, Bernardo had raped around 50 women by himself before hooking up
with Homolka and was never caught as the rape spree continued. He
committed the rapes in at least two different jurisdictions and the
police jealously guarded their own cases rather than working with the
other jurisdictions in harmony.

Then Bernardo hooked up with Homolka and things took a turn. Wikipedia
says:

=================================================================

According to Homolka, her husband Paul Bernardo became attracted to her
younger sister, Tammy Homolka, during the summer of 1990 (this
attraction was confirmed by Bernardo, during an interview conducted in
2007 while in custody, to have begun in July 1990). Karla hatched a
plan to help Bernardo drug Tammy, seeing an opportunity to "minimise
risks, take control, and keep it all in the family."[14] In July,
"according to Bernardo's testimony, he and Karla served Tammy a
spaghetti dinner spiked with Valium stolen from Karla's workplace.
Bernardo raped Tammy for about a minute before she started to wake
up."[15]

Homolka later stole the anesthetic agent halothane from the St.
Catharines veterinarian clinic where she worked. On December 23, 1990,
after a Christmas party at the Homolka household, Bernardo and Homolka
drugged Tammy with the animal tranquilizer. The couple subsequently
raped Tammy while she was unconscious. Tammy later choked on her own
vomit and died. Before calling 9-1-1, Bernardo and Homolka hid the
evidence, did the laundry, redressed Tammy (who had a chemical burn on
her face), and moved her into her basement bedroom. A few hours later,
Tammy was pronounced dead at St. Catharines General Hospital without
having regained consciousness. Bernardo told police he had
unsuccessfully tried to revive her, and her death was ruled an
accident.[15]

====================================================================

This behaviour was essentially repeated with a 15 year old girl that
Homolka had befriended (some friend!); this girl was raped once under
the influence of a sedative then almost died the second time they tried
it but Bernardo and Homolka were able to revive her.

THEN they kidnapped and murdered Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, 14
and 15 years old respectively. But after that, things started to go
wrong and Bernardo lay a beating on Homolka and she went to the police.
That's where they worked out the deal about the video tape of the
killings. One of the terms of the deal was that if the police found out
about any killings beyond Mahaffy and French, the deal was off and she
was going to go down for it in a big way. Then, it was determined that
Tammy had effectively been murdered by Bernardo and Karla Homolka BUT
SOMEHOW THIS DIDN'T INVALIDATE THE DEAL!!!

I have never understood why things went that way. The cops and
prosecutors had a perfect opportunity to lock her up too but they
whiffed it. Instead, she got a sweetheart deal of 12 years of which she
was only expected to serve some of that before being paroled. However,
the parole board went against its longstanding pattern of releasing
prisoners when they had only served 2/3 - or often 1/3 - of the
sentence judging her to be at considerable risk to reoffend. Hooking up
with a convicted murderer while in prison helped them reach that
decision. But she eventually served the whole sentence and was allowed
to leave. She moved to the Caribbean for a time but is apparently
living in Quebec now. As far as anyone knows, she hasn't reoffended yet
but given her psychology, I wouldn't rule anything out.

The Wikipedia article on her is very troubling. There is a lot of
evidence to suggest she wasn't just an unwilling participant in these
crimes but was an enthusiastic participant in them. Bernardo swears that
she was the one that murdered French and Mahaffy, not him, but of
course that could merely be self-serving. I don't suppose we'll ever
know for sure. It's very troubling that she got away with her part in
things as lightly as she did.

Moral: cops aren't infallible and even if they get the search
legalities right, that doesn't mean they're going to find the goods -
sometimes with spectacular consequences.

The failure to find the truck driver in his own truck would seem to be
a prime example of that!
--
Rhino