Leslie Erin Mahaffy (July 5, 1976 – June 16, 1991) was a Canadian murder victim of killers

Paul Bernardo Paul Kenneth Bernardo (born August 27, 1964), also known as The Scarborough Rapist and The Schoolgirl Killer, is a Canadian serial killer and serial rapist. He is known for initially committing a series of rapes in Scarborough, Ontario, a subu ...

and

Karla Homolka Karla Leanne Homolka (born May 4, 1970), also known as Karla Leanne Teale, Leanne Teale, and Leanne Bordelais, is a Canadian serial killer who acted as an accomplice to her husband, Paul Bernardo, taking active part in the actual rapes and murde ...

. At the time of her death, she was a resident of

Burlington, Ontario Burlington is a city in the Regional Municipality of Halton at the northwestern end of Lake Ontario in Ontario, Canada. Along with Milton to the north, it forms the western end of the Greater Toronto Area and is also part of the Hamilton met ...

and a Grade 9 student at

M.M. Robinson High School M.M. Robinson High School is a high school located in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. It is administered by the Halton District School Board. There are approx. 1200 students attending MMR with programs addressing all Pathways. Founded in 1963, the ...

. Mahaffy's kidnapping was one in a series of disappearances of Ontario schoolgirls in the early 1990s, including

Kristen French Kristen Dawn French (May 10, 1976 – April 19, 1992) was a Canadian teen who was abducted and murdered by Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. She was interred at Pleasantview Memorial Gardens, Thorold, Ontario, Canada. Biography French was b ...

, also a victim of Bernardo and Homolka. Prior to killing Mahaffy in 1991 and French in 1992, the pair had raped and killed Homolka's teenaged sister Tammy in 1990. The disappearances, arrests, and convictions were widely covered in Canadian media, becoming one of the most notorious crimes in Canadian history.

Family

Leslie Erin Mahaffy was born July 5, 1976. Her brother Ryan was born some years later. Her father was an

oceanographer Oceanography (), also known as oceanology and ocean science, is the scientific study of the oceans. It is an Earth science, which covers a wide range of topics, including ecosystem dynamics; ocean currents, waves, and geophysical fluid dynamics ...

for the Canadian federal Fisheries and Oceans department, and sometimes would be on assignments away from home for weeks at a time. Her mother was a teacher.''Deadly Innocence'' at pp. 5-6, 20-27, 317-320, 520-524. Though she had been close to her family, when she turned fourteen, Mahaffy began to rebel and spend periods of time away from the family home but always phoned home during her absences and kept in touch with her younger brother Ryan, with whom she was very close. Shortly before her abduction, some friends had been killed in a car accident. The evening prior to her abduction, Leslie attended a memorial for one of the teens as well as an informal get-together and subsequently missed her Friday night curfew. Finding the door locked, Leslie traveled to a nearby plaza to use the pay telephone to ask a friend if she might spend the night at the friend's home but was refused. Returning home, she crossed paths with Bernardo who had been out looking into back yards, hoping to find a victim. Bernardo lured Leslie back to his nearby car and took her to the house he shared with Homolka. Later that day, Leslie's friend telephoned the Mahaffy house to inquire about Leslie's well-being and explained the call that Leslie had made after discovering that she had been locked out, prompting Leslie's mother to start searching for Leslie. Finding no trace of her daughter, she eventually became concerned and contacted the police. When Mahaffy failed to phone home on her own birthday about two weeks later, her family was certain that she had not called them because she could not. Her mother Debbie would later become prominent in the struggle to maintain and enforce the judge's gag order about the trials of Mahaffy's killers and the videotapes they made of their own crimes, which were used as evidence against them. Mahaffy's remains are interred under a family headstone at Burlington Memorial Gardens in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. There is also a heart-shaped garden with a plaque in Leslie's honour at

, and a

memorial bench A memorial bench, memorial seat or death bench is a piece of outdoor furniture which commemorates a dead person. Such benches are typically made of wood, but can also be made of metal, stone, or synthetic materials such as plastics. Typically mem ...

close to her family headstone.

Kidnapping

At the time of her abduction and subsequent murder in mid-June 1991, a few weeks before her fifteenth birthday, Leslie Mahaffy was a Grade 9 student at

in Burlington. Like many teens that age, she wore braces on her teeth. On the evening of June 14, 1991, Mahaffy went to a funeral home to attend a

wake Wake or The Wake may refer to: Culture *Wake (ceremony), a ritual which takes place during some funeral ceremonies *Wakes week, an English holiday tradition * Parish Wake, another name of the Welsh ', the fairs held on the local parish's patron s ...

for her friend Chris Evans, a boy who had died in a car accident earlier that week. After the wake, a large group of teens met in the woods to drink and console one another. As the evening wound down, a couple of friends walked her home shortly before 2:00 AM, where they stayed with her while she found the side door locked. She told them the front door would surely be unlocked, and sent them home. After they left her, she found the front door was locked as well. Now alone, Mahaffy walked to a pay phone at Macs Milk and called a friend's house for permission to sleep over. Her friend told her no, and after a lengthy conversation that ended after 2:30 AM, Mahaffy said she would go back home and wake up her own mother to get in the house. When Mahaffy failed to appear later that day at the funerals for her friend Chris Evans and the three teens killed with him, her mother phoned the police. On June 18, Debbie Mahaffy filed the official paperwork to have her daughter sought and arrested as a runaway. Paul Bernardo eventually admitted he had been on Keller Court, where the Mahaffy home was located, to steal license plates. He saw Leslie Mahaffy alone. He claims he told her he was breaking into the house next door and then offered her a cigarette, which he said was back at his car. When she was close enough to the car, he said he wrapped his sweatshirt quickly around her head, forced her into the vehicle, and took her to the home he shared with Homolka. Homolka's version of the story is similar, but she claims that once he got Mahaffy to the car to fetch the cigarette, he pulled a knife on the girl to get her compliance. Both agree that Homolka was not present during the kidnapping.

Murder

After 24 hours of rape and abuse by both of the killers, Mahaffy was murdered sometime on June 15, 1991. According to Homolka, Bernardo strangled Mahaffy with an electrical cord a second time when the first attempt left her unconscious for a few minutes. Homolka, a veterinary technician, had access to sedative drugs which were used to subdue Mahaffy, the same technique the pair used in the rape and inadvertent murder of Homolka's sister six months before. Bernardo stated that he was out of the room, preparing the car to transport Mahaffy to a location where she would be released, when the heavily-drugged Mahaffy died. He has claimed he did not even know she was dead until, after putting gas in the car and taking a shower, he tried to pick her up to carry her away. He said he and Homolka panicked, and that he tried to give Mahaffy

artificial respiration Artificial ventilation (also called artificial respiration) is a means of assisting or stimulating respiration, a metabolic process referring to the overall exchange of gases in the body by pulmonary ventilation, external respiration, and interna ...

. Both killers agree that they gave her a

teddy bear A teddy bear is a stuffed toy in the form of a bear. Developed apparently simultaneously by toymakers Morris Michtom in the U.S. and Richard Steiff under his aunt Margarete Steiff's company in Germany in the early 20th century, the teddy bear, ...

to hold during breaks between assaults. On June 16, 1991, Bernardo and Homolka moved Mahaffy's body from an upstairs bedroom to the basement. During this time, Bernardo and Homolka hosted Homolka's family for a Father's Day dinner on the main floor of the house, with Homolka making a special effort to keep her mother from going downstairs. When the family left, Bernardo and Homolka used his grandfather's circular saw to dismember Mahaffy's body into pieces small enough to lift when covered with concrete. Later, in a confession to her aunt before revealing details to the police, Homolka claimed that Bernardo did this while she was at work on Monday. Bernardo's version asserts that she did not help him rinse and bag the body parts. Mahaffy's body was found dismembered and encased in concrete on June 29, 1991 in Lake Gibson near

St. Catharines, Ontario St. Catharines is the largest city in Canada's Niagara Region and the sixth largest urban area in the province of Ontario. As of 2016, it has an area of , 136,803 residents, and a metropolitan population of 406,074. It lies in Southern Ontari ...

. The concrete block containing the torso weighed over 200 pounds. Her braces and dental records confirmed her identity. Investigators immediately believed she had been

rape Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or ag ...

d and

torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. Some definitions are restricted to acts c ...

d. This was confirmed when videotapes were discovered in the home of Bernardo and Homolka. The tapes show that she was held hostage for approximately 24 hours and repeatedly assaulted and

sodomized Sodomy () or buggery (British English) is generally Anal sex, anal or oral sex between people, or Human sexual activity, sexual activity between a person and a non-human animal (Zoophilia, bestiality), but it may also mean any non-Reproduction, ...

. After Bernardo's final bid for an appeal before the Supreme Court was rejected, the tapes were all destroyed by the

Ontario government The government of Ontario (french: Gouvernement de l'Ontario) is the body responsible for the administration of the Canadian province of Ontario. A constitutional monarchy, the Crown—represented in the province by the lieutenant governor— ...

Bernardo's 2005 statements

Several days before Homolka's release from prison in 2005, Bernardo was interviewed by police and his lawyer, Tony Bryant. Bryant was subsequently interviewed by the media, providing Bernardo's thoughts about the release. According to Bryant, Bernardo claimed that he had always intended to free the girls he and Homolka had held captive. Bernardo claimed that Homolka was worried that Leslie Mahaffy's blindfold had fallen off, and that she would be able to identify them. Further, Bernardo claimed that Homolka's plan was to murder Mahaffy by injecting an air bubble into her bloodstream, eventually causing an

embolism An embolism is the lodging of an embolus, a blockage-causing piece of material, inside a blood vessel. The embolus may be a blood clot (thrombus), a fat globule ( fat embolism), a bubble of air or other gas (gas embolism), amniotic fluid (amniot ...

."Bernardo's lawyer says killer 'agitated' over attention given to Homolka"

CBC News CBC News is a division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the news gathering and production of news programs on the corporation's English-language operations, namely CBC Television, CBC Radio, CBC News Network, and CBC.ca. ...

, July 6, 2005

Video and television accounts

* ''Dark Heart, Iron Hand''. Documentary broadcast by

MSNBC MSNBC (originally the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company) is an American news-based pay television cable channel. It is owned by NBCUniversala subsidiary of Comcast. Headquartered in New York City, it provides news coverage and political ...

. Rebroadcast as an episode of the series ''

MSNBC Investigates ''MSNBC Documentaries'' is the umbrella title of a series of documentaries co-produced by NBC News and MSNBC. Broadcast on MSNBC, each documentary is given its own title to broadcast under (e.g., ''Lockup: Return to Pelican Bay'') or has been p ...

'' retitled "To Love and To Kill" May 31, 2002 MSNBC Investigates
"''To Love and To Kill''....a classic program from our Crime Files." Accessed September 5, 2007. and September 4, 2007.MSNBC Investigates
episode schedule. Accessed September 5, 2007. * ''Karla'' starring

Laura Prepon Laura Helene Prepon (born March 7, 1980) is an American actress. She rose to fame with her role as Donna Pinciotti in the Fox sitcom ''That '70s Show'' (1998–2006). She is also known for portraying Alex Vause in the Netflix comedy-drama series ...

and

Misha Collins Dmitri "Misha" Collins "My mom went to Russia when she was in college, and ��she had a boyfriend whose name was Mitya, which she thought was the same as Misha, which it's not. And his real name was Dmitri, so my real name, actually—my birth c ...

. Monterey Video (2007) No ISBN available. . * The premiere episode of ''

Wicked Attraction ''Wicked Attraction'' (broadcast in some countries as ''Couples Who Kill'') is an American true-crime documentary television series on Investigation Discovery which began airing in the United States in 2008. The series focuses on how two seeming ...

'', a television show which focuses on couples who commit heinous crimes, focuses on Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. The episode, entitled "The Perfect Couple" first aired on August 7, 2008.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mahaffy, Leslie 1990s missing person cases 1991 in Ontario 1991 murders in Canada Child abduction in Canada Formerly missing people June 1991 events in Canada Missing person cases in Canada Murder in Ontario Rape in Canada Torture in Canada Incidents of violence against girls Female murder victims