Leslie Mahaffy

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.

Family

Leslie Erin Mahaffy was born July 5, 1976, to Debbie Smith Mahaffy and Robert "Dan" Mahaffy. 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. When 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 she was picked up by Bernardo while she was sitting outside her home), 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.