Leslie Mahaffy

Leslie Erin Mahaffy (July 5, 1976 – June 16, 1991) was a 14-year-old Canadian girl and the first murder victim of 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. She was born in Hamilton, Ontario.

Bernardo was convicted of two first-degree murders and two aggravated sexual assaults, and sentenced to life in prison. Homolka was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment. Mahaffy's kidnapping was one in a series of disappearances of Ontario schoolgirls in the early 1990s which also included Kristen French, who was kidnapped and murdered by Bernardo and Homolka ten months after Mahaffy's murder. Six months before Mahaffy's murder, Homolka's teenage sister Tammy had aspirated her own vomit after having been drugged and raped by the couple. The disappearances, arrests, and convictions were widely covered in the media, becoming one of the most notorious criminal cases in Canadian history.

Family

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.