from the article "A moral vacuity in her which is difficult if not impossible to explain": law, psychiatry and the remaking of Karla Homolka by Anne McGillivray, Associate Professor of Law, University of Manitoba, Canada:

Carla Homolka and her husband Paul Bernardo were convicted in 1993 and 1995 respectively of the abduction, torture, rape and murder of two teenage girls in the small lakeside town of St Catharine's, Ontario. Police, lawyers and judges—indeed, the legal system itself—were profoundly challenged by the disjunction between available scripts for crimes of sexual violence and for women who 'go wrong'. The fragmenting of notions of justice and agency is seen in investigation and evidence-gathering, in the plea bargain made with Homolka and in Bernardo's trial, which starred Homolka as witness for the prosecution and publicly revealed for the first time the extent of her participation in the crimes. Her sentence of 12 years concurrent was a compromise between contested notions of women's agency, a play-off between competing ideas about womanhood and subjectivity against male sadism and dominance. The public uproar following Canada's 'trial of the century' precipitated an investigation by the Ontario Attorney-General of the Homolka plea bargain....

Homolka, in the popular view, should have taken her seat beside him in the prisoner's box and seat of ultimate evil.

Underlying the disquiet was a fear that gender somehow won, that Homolka, being female, was held less culpable on that basis alone. This denied women's equality and moral autonomy. Conversely, it was a sort of witchery through pretended weakness, lies and manipulation, the successful use by an evil woman of obnoxious female traits.2 Feminists and anti-feminists could unite in their disapprobation of Homolka and her self-created images, first of normality—pretty teen, party girl, beautiful bride, dutiful daughter, supportive wife—and then of the controlled and battered woman with symptoms culled from the Lenore Walker classic on her gaol cell bookshelf.