Leslie Erin Mahaffy (July 5, 1976 – June 16, 1991) was the second Canadian murder victim of killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
At the time of her death, she was a resident of Burlington, Ontario, and a Grade 9 student at M.M. Robinson High School.
Leslie Erin Mahaffy was born on July 5, 1976.
Her brother Ryan was born some years later.
Her father was an oceanographer 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.
As she grew older, Mahaffy began to 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 backyards, 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 honor at M.M. Robinson High School and a memorial bench close to her family headstone.
1990
Mahaffy's kidnapping was one in a series of disappearances of Ontario schoolgirls in the early 1990s, including Kristen French, also a victim of Bernardo and Homolka.
1991
Prior to killing Mahaffy in 1991 and French in 1992, the pair had raped and killed Homolka's teenage 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.
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 M.M. Robinson High School 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 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 Mac's 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.
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.
