MONTREAL

Well, look who’s slipped back into the home and native land that reviles and hates her.

Thanks to a bizarre confluence of circumstances, Karla Homolka’s sister found herself having to reveal to a court here Friday that the former wife and convicted accomplice of serial killer Paul Bernardo is now back living in Quebec after years of exile in the Caribbean with her husband and three kids. And they’ve even had a recent visit together.

Thanks, sis. Or rather, thank you to fan Luka Magnotta.

It was at Magnotta’s first-degree murder trial that the former Lori Homolka was called to testify via videolink from Kitchener about her brush with the confessed killer. Now calling herself Logan Valentini after changing her name in 1996, the blonde, 43-year-old Zehrs cashier in St. Catharines testified she’s never met the Scarborough porn actor and sex trade worker.

Yet she was sucked into Magnotta’s toxic web when he chose to use her new name and real address as the sender on one of the four posted boxes containing the severed hands and feet of his victim, Jun Lin.

Mailed on May 25, 2012 to False Creek Elementary School, the bloody parcel also contained a pink note: “Roses are red, violets are blue. The police will need dental records to identify you. Bitch.”

Montreal police contacted Valentini soon after its delivery and asked if she had sent the grisly package. The mystified woman assured detectives she was not the sender and was stunned that someone would once again associate her with a horrific killing.

“I didn’t know why I would be dragged into something again that had nothing to do with me,” Valentini said with obvious irritation.

Why indeed? Was using her name just Magnotta’s idea of a sick joke? Or evidence of a fascination with Homolka and Bernardo, the infamous killer who also hailed from Scarborough?

It hardly seems like a coincidence that two of the four boxes had the return address of a Renee Bordelais. Bordelais is Karla Homolka’s married surname after she wed Thierry Bordelais, brother of her former Quebec lawyer.

Valentini confirmed for those on the jury too young to remember that Homolka served 12 years in prison for her role in the sex slayings of teenaged schoolgirls Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy and that of their own sister Tammy during the couple’s spree of evil between 1990 and 1992. Bernardo is serving a life sentence but the “deal with the devil” saw Homolka released in 2005.

Her efforts to live under the radar in her new province of Quebec were constantly thwarted by investigative reporters. Rumours then abounded that she’d left with her new husband for the French Caribbean and two years ago those stories were confirmed when Homolka was found by journalist Paula Todd living with her hubby and three young children in Guadeloupe under the name Leanne Bordelais.

In her hometown of St. Catharines and beyond, public fascination with the Homolkas has never waned and despite her efforts to distance herself by changing her name, Valentini said her new identity is widely known by anyone who has surfed the web.

And so it would be easily found by Magnotta as well.

“It’s always floating around, it’s on different websites. Once it’s there, you can’t erase it,” she complained. “It’s public information.”

So she is unlikely to ever live down the notoriety of being related to a child killer. “I just wanted to live my life, quietly, and free,” Valentini said, but “everybody knows.”

Her sister, though, had fared much better, living in the sunny climes of a Caribbean island far from the prying eyes of Canadians with long memories. Or so we had thought.

More than two decades have passed since those innocent girls were murdered and Homolka must have thought the coast was now clear to return. How ironic that after all these years of playing cat and mouse with those who refuse to let her escape her heinous crimes, Karla Homolka has been outed by her own surviving sister.

Let the circus begin. She deserves every bit of it.

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