Canadian Is Convicted in Sex Slayings of Teen-Age Girls, Gets Life Sentence : Crime: Sensational trial included videotapes of killer assaulting victims. His ex-wife testified against him in plea bargain.

A 31-year-old former accountant who videotaped his sexual assaults on teen-age girls was convicted Friday of two counts of first-degree murder and other charges, ending a sensational trial that has transfixed Canada.

Paul Bernardo was immediately sentenced to two concurrent terms of life in prison. He will be eligible for parole in 25 years, but legal experts said Friday that it is unlikely he ever will be freed.

Canada has no death penalty, so Bernardo’s sentence was the maximum punishment possible.

The jury deliberated seven hours after getting the case Thursday. Bernardo stood impassively as the verdicts were read. The families of the victims, Leslie Mahaffy, 14, and Kristen French, 15, wept.

In separate incidents in 1991 and 1992, the girls were kidnaped off the street and taken to the home Bernardo shared with his then-wife, Karla Homolka, in the Ontario city of St. Catherines, near Niagara Falls.

There, the victims were sexually assaulted and tortured by Bernardo and Homolka, then killed. Leslie’s body was dismembered, encased in concrete and dropped in a lake. Kristen’s body was dumped in a ditch by the side of a road.

The key prosecution witness in the 14-week trial was Homolka, 25, who agreed to testify in return for a reduced sentence in a controversial plea bargain in 1993. Homolka is serving a 12-year sentence for manslaughter and will be eligible for parole in July, 1997.

Homolka said Bernardo strangled the two girls with electrical cord while she watched. She portrayed herself as a battered wife forced to participate in Bernardo’s crimes and said she left Bernardo in January, 1993, in fear she would be his next victim.

In testimony in his own defense, Bernardo admitted he kidnaped, confined and assaulted the girls and disposed of their bodies but said they died while they were alone with Homolka.

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But most telling were videotapes Bernardo shot of his captives. The tapes do not show the murders but provided some of the most gruesome evidence ever presented in a Canadian court. The tapes, repeatedly shown to the jury, record Bernardo and Homolka assaulting, threatening and humiliating the victims.

At the request of the victims’ families, the judge refused to permit the courtroom audience to see the tapes but allowed spectators to hear them as they were played for the jury.

Bernardo hid the tapes in the ceiling of his home behind a light fixture, and they were overlooked by police during a three-month search of the house. As a result, authorities did not have the videotapes when they negotiated the plea agreement with Homolka.

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The trial has drawn huge public interest in Canada. Hundreds of people lined up daily, sometimes overnight, to get into the court. A request by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the national public broadcaster, to reverse judicial precedent here and televise the trial was turned down by the judge.

Bernardo will return to court Sept. 15 for sentencing on the other counts, including kidnaping, sexual assault, forcible confinement and committing an indignity on a dead body.

He also faces separate charges in rapes committed in the Toronto area in the late 1980s and in the death of his sister-in-law, Tammy Homolka, 15. Prosecutors already have elicited evidence that she choked to death after being drugged and assaulted by Bernardo and Karla Homolka on Christmas Eve, 1990.