Was it just me, or were other people struck by the unsettling coincidence that the story of Karla Homolka giving birth to a baby boy broke just as the news is full of the horrible details of the Robert Pickton trial in British Columbia?

What a pair to be in competition for headlines: She is one of Canada’s most notorious criminals and he stands accused of the country’s most vile serial killing spree.

For the parents of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French — the teenagers killed by Homolka and her former husband Paul Bernardo in 1991 and 1992 — it must have been a doubly painful blow.

Pickton’s trial can’t help but remind them of the time they spent in a courtroom with their daughters’ killers. Now, they’ve been confronted with the announcement the person who tore a hole in their lives has begun to get on with her own.

As Tim Danson, the lawyer for the Mahaffy and French families, said: “They’ll never be grandparents from Kristen and Leslie, and won’t have a normal life. And, here’s Karla Homolka who’s free and giving birth — that’s the disturbing irony.”

And what are the rest of us to make of Homolka’s motherhood? I’ve heard normally temperate people argue that she should have been sterilized when she left prison. I’ve heard others suggest that since she’s paid her dues, it’s time to leave her alone.

That’s unlikely of course. Clever, narcissistic and manipulative, she’s always been a troubling, confounding and fascinating figure. During her trial, journalists and writers struggled to make sense of a woman who participated in the rape and murder of her little sister and the torture and killing of two other girls. Was she the victim of abuse or the ringleader?

Now, we must grapple with the idea that this woman is a mother. If it weren’t so terribly, unimaginably grim, it’s almost a joke to imagine Karla Homolka attending a parent-teacher conference, or offering to chaperone a field trip.

But it’s not funny, of course. It’s the least funny thing in the world to think about that baby boy in her care. What kind of life will he have? What will he be told about his Aunt Tammy and about two girls named Leslie and Kristen?

With the spectre of his mother’s past hanging over him, is there a chance at all that he might grow up untraumatized?

Not likely. In her selfish act of creating a life, Homolka just as quickly destroyed it.