Leslie Mahaffy
| Leslie Mahaffy | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 5, 1976 Canada |
| Died | June 16, 1991 (aged 14) Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation | Student |
Leslie Erin Mahaffy (July 5, 1976 – June 16, 1991) was a Canadian murder victim of killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. At the time of her death, she was a 14-year-old student and resident of Burlington, Ontario. 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. 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.
Leslie Erin Mahaffy was born 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.
Though she had been close to her family, when she turned fourteen, Mahaffy began to rebel and run away from home. However, she always phoned home during her absences. She missed the funeral of a friend the day after she missed a Friday night curfew (her mother locked her out of the house), and it was reported by the media at the time that she was picked up by Bernardo and Homolka at a small plaza in Burlington where she had been using a public telephone. Her mother became gravely 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, Canada. There is also a heart-shaped garden with a plaque in Leslie's honour at M.M. Robinson High School, and a memorial bench nearby her family headstone. The remains of her killers' third and final victim, Kristen French, were dumped on a side road near the Mahaffy gravesite.
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