Canadian serial killers don't impress Americans

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka may have become Canada’s most notorious serial killers, but they barely make it onto the “American Richter scale,” Pennsylvania criminal justice professor Scott Thornsley, left, says.

Thornsley, who teaches a serial murder course at Mansfield University, in Mansfield, and at Nipissing University via teleconferencing, was in North Bay Wednesday for several live seminars and gave his take on the Bernardo-Homolka case.

“Even though they killed the pre-requisite three number of kills, Americans would be horrified about that, but we’re used to being even more horrified by killing and eating and removing body parts and displaying them, and that’s what gets our attention,” Thornsley said.

“This was just a tragedy, but it’s not what we were expecting. It just didn’t rise to the level of capturing our attention, of what we expect of a good serial killer, as terrible as that sounds to the families of the victims.”

Wasn't big enough news
The story did make it into several major American newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, Thornsley said, and National Enquirer dubbed Bernardo and Homolka the ‘Ken and Barbie killers’.

As well the case was included in several books written by serial murder profilers such as John Douglas, Roy Hazelwood and Greg McCreary.

“But other than we just don’t know enough about Bernardo and Homolka because it just wasn’t big enough news, plus it was competing with the OJ Simpson case in 1995,” Thornsley said.

Canadian books written about the case aren’t even in U.S. bookstores, he added.
“It just did not capture our attention, but maybe it will when Karla is released in the year 2005, but not yet.”

Hardest working analyst around
Thornsley, who says his serial murder course has “everything students like, blood, guts and sex,” is part of an exchange program which sees Nipissing criminal justice professor Jane Barker deliver video lectures to Mansfield students.

Thornsley rose to “my 17 minutes of fame” as a media analyst in the case of John Lee Malvo and John Muhammad—now being prosecuted as the Virginia snipers—when he gave over 100 interviews to newspapers and television, including a live appearance on Meet the Press.

“I was the hardest working analyst around because I always returned phone calls 16, 24 hours a day, and I delivered my assessment in a way the average person could understand, I was told by the media,” Thornsley said.

Because of the lust
Serial killers can be categorized in several different ways, Thornsley said.

The most familiar category is the hedonist serial killer, “the ones who do it for fun, for the thrill of the kill, because it’s fun, it’s entertaining.”

Some serial killers kill because of the “sexual component, because of the lust,” Thornsley said.

“But most use sex as a vehicle to get to what’s really important to serial killers, power, control and domination,” Thornsley said.

“And there’s nobody more powerful than a person who holds life and death over somebody. Very few of us are ever that powerful.”

New category for serial killers
Some serial killers kill for money, Thornsley said, and others kill “because they really think God or the devil” told them to.

“And there are some who kill because they believe they have a mission, and they believe they should satisfy that mission of killing prostitutes or exotic dancers.”

The Virginia snipers have provided a new category for serial killing, Thornsley said.

They killed because of the thrill, but also because it elevated them to the immediate status as “one of the most horrific team serial killers we have,” Thornsley said, "because they terrorized a nation."

“Leonard Lake and Charles Ng just killed dozens of people but they didn’t terrorize a region or a country, or hold us captive for weeks and weeks,” Thornsley said.

“It’s going to take somebody really unusual to capture our attention like Muhammad and Malvo did last year.”

Thornsley said one thing he didn't do while providing media comments on the sniper case was offer a profile of who the shooters could be.

He would have been wrong had he done so, Thornsley said.

"Statistically the profile would have been white male, acting by himself. And then, poof, what do you have? Two black males, team serial killers, very unusual," Thornsley said.

"So I would have been off the mark, but at least I didn't embarrass myself."