Canada's Highest and Most Controversial Crime Story 'Ken and Barbie Killers' 2021 is a four-part documentary about Canada's most controversial crime and punishment story.
Carla Homolka is now a wife and mother of three children. An ordinary pretty woman. But her biography is quite unusual. In 1991, a young 20-year-old beauty married a handsome young man named Paul Bernardo. From the outside, they seemed a beautiful happy couple, it is no coincidence that the press will later call them the killers of Ken and Barbie.
But during the three years of married life, the couple caused the death of three teenage girls, one of whom is Carla’s sister. The couple sexually abused their victims and recorded it on video. The woman actively took part in all that was happening, but in 1993 a man beat her - her parents recorded injuries and contributed to their divorce.
After the domestic violence incident, Ken and Barbie came under police scrutiny. The suggestion that these people might be involved in high-profile crimes has become more closely investigated. As a result, the young people were brought to justice.
Paul Bernardo received a life sentence, but the story of Carla Homolka was much more unusual. With the help of a lawyer, she managed to present herself as another victim of a man, rather than as a full-fledged accomplice. She made a deal with the police and ended up serving 12 years in prison. After her release in 2005, the 35-year-old married her lawyer’s brother and had three children. And she could well live happily and peacefully if it were not for journalists and the Canadian community.
In the 2010s, there was a very loud debate about whether the press and the public should give Karla Chomolka a right to privacy, or whether the journalists who track her down rightly cover the fact that a woman who brutally killed several teenagers comes to an ordinary school to pick up her children every day.
“Ken and Barbie Killers” is more than timely. Western society actively promotes the MeToo and TimesUp movements, placing a huge burden of blame and responsibility on men for their behavior. Men manipulate and use weak women, they sexually exploit women and they can only find the strength to realize the wrongness of the relationship in which they were dragged and talk about it after many years.
But the story of Karla Chomolka, full of dialectical contradictions, on the one hand clearly shows that women next to bad men are not necessarily victims. They can enjoy what they do and should be equally responsible for it.
On the other hand, the story of Karla Chomolka shows that the victim position is very convenient and profitable. Her ex-husband has repeatedly claimed that his wife killed the girls. But who would believe him? The recorded beatings on the woman’s body became an irrefutable and reinforced concrete argument, turning all the words of a woman into truth, and all the words of a man into lies.
“Ken and Barbie Killers: The Lost Murder Tapes” 2021 is not a perfect project, but definitely worthy of attention.