Murder of Leslie Mahaffy

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.

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 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.

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. The concrete block containing the torso weighed over 200 pounds. Her braces and dental records confirmed her identity.

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 resident of Burlington, Ontario and a Grade 9 student at M.M. Robinson High School. 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.