Leslie Mahaffy - Family

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.

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 (the highschool she attended), 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.