There are some 40,000 individuals on Canada’s sex offender registry.

Karla Homolka isn’t among them.

The federal registry was created in 2004 and strengthened seven years later so that all sex offenders would be placed in the data bank immediately, not only when the Crown requested it and a judge made the order.

But Homolka committed her crimes in the early ’90s and the registry isn’t retroactive.

In any event, the schoolgirl killer was never convicted of a sex crime. She pleaded out — that notorious “deal with the devil” — to manslaughter in the slaying of 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy and 15-year-old Kristen French, and acknowledged her role in the drug-rape of younger sister Tammy, who choked to death during the assault.

Homolka received a 12-year negotiated sentence. No extra prison time was added for Tammy when sex videos subsequently surfaced of Homolka violating her unconscious sibling. No extra prison time was added for Homolka’s participation in the drug-rape of another teenager, Jane Doe, an assault she didn’t originally disclose.

Collectively, these were the worst sex crimes — at least the most shocking, the most incensing — in Canadian history.

Homolka is a serial sex killer, cloaked inside the legal distinction of manslaughter.

Yet we can’t touch her, can’t know when she moves into our neighbourhood, can’t take any steps to protect children from a woman who has always traded on her intensely sexualized compulsions — when she was destroying lives with Bernardo, when she was out on bail and trolling bars, and when she was behind bars.

The over-arcing motif of Homolka’s life has been sexual deviancy. It’s what made her a willing accomplice to Bernardo, her procuring of victims and flat disaffectedness to their suffering. Even with her husband out of the picture, she preyed. And, abetted by lawyers, she connived for her sweetheart deal.

Homolka was always and manifestly the smarter of the two monsters. Book-smart and intuitively smart. Her nuanced performance as main Crown witness against Bernardo — 17 days on the stand — demonstrated how adeptly she could dodge and rebuff the volleys of the best criminal legalists in the business. Bernardo’s lawyers got nowhere with her. She was like an anvil, blunting every strike.

Whether psychopath or sociopath, Homolka is the red warning strobe that keeps on flashing.

We knew, from a bizarre tangent of the 2014 Luke Magnotta murder trial, that Homolka was back in Quebec, where she’d spent most of her soft time. That she’d returned from Guadeloupe with her husband — brother of Homolka’s lawyer during the inmate’s 2005 hearing on release restrictions — and their three young children.

Dozens of restrictions imposed, all of them withdrawn by the court within mere months of Homolka completing her entire sentence. Also a clever decision, that, to abandon her earlier bid for statutory release after serving two-thirds of the sentence. Full time essentially put Homolka beyond the monitoring reach of corrections and parole officials.

Only this week did we discover precisely where Homolka and her family are living — the Montreal suburb of Chateauguay.

How rich that Homolka called the cops when reporters descended on the house.

How chilling that she’s again using the name Leanne Teale. Homolka and Bernardo legally changed their names to Leanne and Paul Jason Teale, taken from a movie about a serial killer.

She clearly hasn’t relinquished all the symbolic connections to her ex-husband and their merciless crime spree.

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And advocates for rehabilitation demand mercy for her now? Because she’s a hounded mother who hasn’t reoffended?

It isn’t simple malice or implacability that has stirred outrage in Chateauguay. These aren’t not-in-my-backyard pitchfork heavers. They’re parents who have good reason to be leery of exposing their kids, especially their teenage daughters, to a known hebephile.

She may never again lick her fingers and jab them into an unconscious adolescent’s vagina or lure a teenage girl into a car by asking for directions or compel abductees to play dress-up or ignore their beseeching for help or stash a body in the basement while entertaining guests upstairs. But Homolka has done all these things. Because the why is beyond knowing, so is the why-not-again.

The felon has superficially transformed herself into soccer mom. But she’s powerfully manipulative and shrewd. Nobody really has a clue what proclivities reside in that twisted personality.

Of course the residents of Chateauguay are distressed and angry. And what does Homolka’s husband say to them? Move, if you don’t like it. That’s what he told La Presse.

The couple’s disregard is withering.

Are parents to accept that motherhood has changed Homolka’s miscreant DNA, even as they profess pity for her children because none of this is their fault and they don’t deserve shunning? Had Homolka and her husband put those children first, they would never have returned to a country where mom’s past was bound to catch up with her.

Spare the children, yes. But Homolka never spared the children of others, not even her own mother’s baby girl.

Do you think she’s had “the talk” yet with her kids? Information they can find with one click on the Internet after some classmate brings the gossip to school.

Gather ’round children and let me tell you a story, about a bad woman who did terrible things.

That’s mummy.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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