TORONTO — It is the obsession with material trinkets that is still so chilling when pondering the mystery that is Karla Homolka.

The champagne flutes she ranted about after learning Paul Bernardo had used them to entertain an abducted teenaged girl. Her overriding concern about getting back some of her belongings from the pink clapboard house where she and Paul Bernardo raped, tortured and killed their victims. The Mickey Mouse wristwatch apparently taken from one of the teens that she wore during her first police interview.

And then there's the perfume, says Carol Anne Davis.

Davis, the Scottish author of the book Women Who Kill, cited Homolka's behaviour while taking investigators on a videotaped tour of her house in Port Dalhousie, Ont., a suburb of St. Catharines: at one point, she asks if she can take a bottle of her sister's perfume from the bathroom.

"Now, this is a house where teenaged victims were sexually abused and murdered, yet all Homolka is thinking about is bottles of scent," Davis says, still incredulous.

"It's Karla's complete lack of remorse that makes Canadians, and indeed the rest of the world, despise her so utterly."

For Davis, Homolka isn't just another garden-variety killer who ratted out the apparent mastermind of her horrific crimes in exchange for less prison time. She's also a cold-blooded woman yet to confront why she committed those crimes.

And she has become a lightning rod for a Canadian public that feels passionately that a feeble criminal justice system willingly allowed a sexual sadist just as complicit as her male accomplice to get off easy, others say.

The public hatred for Homolka continues unabated on the eve of her release from prison after serving a 12-year manslaughter sentence in large part because of the plea bargain she made with authorities, says a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto.

"There was the involvement in the rape and death of her own sister that was particularly heinous, but there is also the belief that she got the lighter sentence even though she was apparently every bit as complicit as Paul Bernardo in these terrible crimes," Rosemary Gartner said.

There's another element, Gartner says. No one has ever been able to figure out why Homolka travelled down the depraved path she did. Her actions remain inexplicable.

Homolka herself was resistant to delving more deeply into what motivated her throughout her 12 years behind bars, a Quebec judge noted last month in imposing strict restrictions on her movements once she leaves prison between June 30 and July 5.

"If she was from a poor family, if she'd been abused all her life, if she was a drug addict, if there was anything that possibly explained how she did what she did, the public might be more forgiving," Gartner said.

"But she was an attractive, intelligent woman from a nice middle-class family. There was no terrible childhood, no history of abuse, nothing that explained her involvement in these crimes. How do we make sense of this woman's actions except to believe she is a vile human being who got away with murder?"

Bernardo, by comparison, had a nightmarish childhood. He was raised by a mentally ill mother in a dysfunctional family.

His mother told him in a rage at the age of 16 that his father, the neighbourhood peeping Tom who was later convicted of sexual molestation, was not his biological father. Marilyn Bernardo then taunted him frequently as a "bastard."

There was no such trauma in Homolka's upbringing. By all accounts, she had a happy childhood, reared by loving parents in a traditional and stable marriage.

Pair that mystery with some of the trifling concerns that Homolka busied herself with in the midst of all the horrors she and Bernardo were perpetrating, and a bone-chilling picture emerges of an apparently soulless woman that is stunning even 12 years later.

She slipped a photo of herself and Bernardo, beaming for the camera, into the casket of her sister Tammy, who was dead by Homolka's hand. She then held a photo of her dead sister over her face and wore her clothes for Bernardo's sexual gratification just weeks after they'd drugged, raped and accidentally killed the 15-year-old girl.

She raged to Bernardo about the fact he poured champagne for Leslie Mahaffy, 14, in the couple's new French-made flutes. The fact that he'd snatched the terrified girl off the streets in his first known abduction didn't seem to cause her any distress. Two days later, she entertained her family by holding a Father's Day dinner as Mahaffy's body lay downstairs in the root cellar.

She planned an elaborate white wedding and was furious at her parents for failing to foot a large portion of the bill in the weeks after the stricken couple had buried their youngest daughter.

And she was wearing a Mickey Mouse wristwatch thought to have belonged to Kristen French when police first questioned her about Bernardo's involvement in a string of rapes in the east-end Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

All of this behaviour goes some way to shedding light on what ails Homolka, said Anne McGillivray, an associate professor of law at the University of Manitoba who has closely followed the case.

"She was and remains an incredible narcissist," McGillivray said. "Her why was Paul Bernardo. She was desperate to prove to everybody that the world was about her and if she had Paul, everyone would realize how good she was, how perfect she was."

But eventually, McGillivray said, that desire to prove herself to the world and realize her long-held dreams of love and marriage mutated horribly.

"It led to her being willing to do anything to hold onto him."

Once they'd killed Tammy, McGillivray said, Homolka was boxed in. Dr. Hans Arndt, the late psychiatrist who treated Homolka almost immediately after the arrest of Bernardo in the spring of 1993, felt that Homolka closed down after the death of her youngest sister and, like a helpless automaton, went along with his diabolical schemes in the years that followed.

"He threatened to tell people that she'd killed Tammy and so it became a self-justification for her," said McGillivray. "A sort of: 'I'm still me, I'm still a good person, this was an accident, it wasn't supposed to happen, I can't admit to this or it will change everything, and I can still have Paul.' "

McGillivray thinks that Homolka, thanks to an incredibly sympathetic lawyer, George Walker - who knew her previously as a kindly veterinary assistant and immediately believed her to be an abuse victim - has come to honestly believe she was the "compliant victim of a sexual sadist."

That's the moniker Niagara Regional Police investigators slapped on Homolka before they'd ever met her. Shortly after she'd left her husband, they saw dramatic photos of her Bernardo-battered face.

"She was so psychiatrized, so explained away at every turn, that she shrouded herself in that," McGillivray said.

And there are many myths about Homolka that contribute to the public hatred of her.

The vast majority of the dozens of psychiatric assessments of Homolka over her 12 years behind bars make clear she is neither a psychopath nor a sexual sadist, adding to the mystery of what caused her to serve as a willing accomplice to Bernardo.

Nor did she manipulate the system in order to get her so-called deal with the devil. Police showed up at Walker's door unexpectedly in the spring of 1993 to offer a deal to his client, who had retained him because she was quite certain she was about to be charged with murder.

Even the battered-wife label isn't one Homolka came up with. That was the work of desperate police and authorities apparently looking for a way to explain her involvement in the crimes since they had not a shred of physical evidence linking Bernardo to the deaths of French and Mahaffy.

Nonetheless, the public is right to be angry, McGillivray said, noting that she disputes suggestions Homolka is getting a rougher ride than many others who have killed and made deals with prosecutors.

And while plea bargains are by necessity a major part of the criminal justice system, she added, the Homolka deal was something different.

"It's not that somebody is dead, it's how they're dead and who did the killing," McGillivray said. "These were children who were terrorized. This was an attractive, engaging woman who looked trustworthy."

Gartner agrees.

"There are lots of women out there who have been abused their entire lives, who have been through hell and back, and they don't commit the types of horrific crimes that Homolka did," she said.

"People have no choice but to believe that she is either evil, or demonstrably crazed. She is clearly intelligent and well-spoken, so she's not demonstrably crazed. That leaves us with evil."