In June 1991, fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy's dismembered body was found in a lake, encased in concrete, near her home town of Burlington in southern Ontario. In April 1992, fifteen-year-old Kristen French was abducted on her way home from school in nearby St. Catharines; her naked corpse was found in a ditch two weeks later.

This past May, police charged a clean-cut twenty-eight-year old, Paul Teale, with two counts each of murder, kidnapping, forcible confinement, and aggravated sexual assault in the cases. Teal was already in custody, having been charged in February with a series of sexual assaults going back a decade. Teale's estranged wife, Karla Homolka, was also charged in the Mahaffy and French cases, with two counts of manslaughter.

The slayings are among the most notorious crimes in Canadian history. But when Homolka came to trial -- a one-day affair on July 6 -- the press was able to cover very little of it. The reason: at the request of prosecutors, Justice Francis Kovacs imposed a sweeping press ban to ensure that Homolka's husband receives a fair trial.

The ban -- opposed, oddly enough, by Teale's lawyers -- barred both the public and members of the American media, from nearby Buffalo. Accredited Canadian journalists were permitted to watch the trial, but not to report on the evidence or most legal details until the completion of Teale's trial, which may not even begin until 1995. The fifty-four reporters who were in the courtroom can discuss the trial only with their editors.

So while Homolka's conviction and twelve-year sentence made headlines from coast to coast, the coverage was vague and uninformative. "It was probably the hardest thing I've had to write," says Gay Abbate, The Globe and Mail's police reporter. "You had to keep catching yourself, saying, 'I can't put that in, I can't say that either.'" Kovacs did permit the media to describe the atmosphere in the court, where hardened crime reporters and veteran cops were reduced to tears by the horrifying details of the murders. Several reporters present have since suffered from recurrent sleeplessness and nightmares.

The ban prevents Canadian reporters from reporting whether Homolka pleaded guilty to the killings -- even though they could report that conviction and sentencing took mere hours; that both prosecution and defense agreed on a statement of evidence; and that the case was heard without a jury. WIVB-TV in Buffalo drew the obvious conclusion -- that Homolka had pleaded guilty -- for its viewers; the Canadian Press wire service accidentally broke the ban with a report that Homolka had pleaded guilty. The bulletin was killed after being on the wire for forty-four minutes.

It is widely assumed that Homolka, twenty-three, who will be eligible for parole in about four years, made a deal with prosecutors to help them convict Teale.

In free press/fair trial clashes, Canada's legal system tilts more toward the fair trial side of the ledger than the American system. Still, such a sweeping press ban is highly controversial. An appeal of the ban by lawyers for The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun, and the CBC, on the ground that the ban violates freedom of speech and the public's right to see justice done, is expected to be heard this fall.

"The consensus amongst speculators is that the Crown is trying to insulate Homolka and itself from being attacked due to the nature of the deal," says Alan Young, a criminal law professor at Toronto's Osgoode Hall Law School. Young thinks that Teale could get a fair trial without the ban: "We have public trials to ensure that Crown attorneys and judges are accountable for their conduct. The Crown couldn't say it wanted a ban to protect itself, so it had to say it needed a ban to protect Paul Teale."

Supporters of the ban denounce the media's "feeding frenzy," a frenzy they see as evidenced by The Toronto Sun's purchase for $ 10,000 of Teale's and Homolka's idyllic wedding photos. "It's moved dangerously close to trial-by-media," says William Trudell of the Ontario Criminal Lawyers' Association.

Kevin Cavanagh, assistant managing editor of the St. Catharines Standard, disagrees. "This community has been through two years of nail-biting hell over these cases," he says. "People needed to know at the very least that justice was being done so they could come to terms with these horrible crimes."

The absence of hard facts has resulted in a grisly rumor mill. Some of the rumors, meanwhile, are true. At a Toronto Blue Jays' game the night after the trial, Cavanagh says, one of his reporters heard a spectator in the Sky Dome describe the killings "point-for-point, bang on, as if she was reading the transcript."

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