TORONTO — Sometime before Tuesday, a pretty blonde woman of 35 will slip out of a penitentiary near Montreal, trying to escape a media mob that has been lying in wait 12 years.

The saga of Karla Homolka has transfixed the country since she helped her husband drug, rape, torture, videotape and kill two teenage girls and cause the death of her own sister. Throughout the trial and ever since, her eyes — hard and icy beneath wavy tresses — have stared regularly at Canada from newspaper boxes and television screens.

She has now served her full prison sentence for manslaughter, and her impending release has sent the media and politicians here into shrill alarm. Appalled and fascinated, Canadians can't seem to get enough.

Homolka has been demonized, analyzed and scandalized. Web sites make competing offers for her head in murder or her hand in marriage. Lawyers, representing even figures remotely involved in the case, have buzzed from cameras to courtrooms with legal petitions and sound bites.

The courts have added conditions to her sentence. Legislators have vowed to rewrite the laws. A filmmaker is promising a movie on her. Two books and a TV special already are out. Her jailhouse gay lover is chattering away on television, and her now-ex husband is itching to tell all, if only the warden would let him. He's doing a life sentence.

"People are in a frenzy about it," said Peter Rosenthal, a Toronto criminal defense lawyer. "They are talking about having stiffer penalties, talking about bringing the death penalty back. It's a frenzy of vengeance."

Respectable newspapers have turned over their front pages to purple-prose columnists. "Lock up your children," warned the Globe and Mail. A prominent television news host, CTV network's Mike Duffy, sniffed with no apparent irony, "We are just a higher class of human than she is."

"It's over the top," said Suanne Kelman, interim chairwoman of the Ryerson University School of Journalism in Toronto. "You would think she represents the greatest threat to humanity in the 21st century."

The dilemma for the mainstream press, Kelman said, is that "it's just the kind of story people love. People love sex scandals, and they are fascinated by sex murders. They love it when the murderer is a woman, especially a sleazy blonde." Homolka, she said, "wouldn't get this kind of attention if she were a homelier woman, or an older woman."

According to press accounts of her childhood, Homolka was just 17, a bright 11th-grader, when she met Paul Bernardo, 23, a charming and handsome man, in 1987. They had sex in a hotel room two hours later and were engaged two years later.

They were an attractive couple, but Bernardo would ultimately be found by police to be a serial rapist, with sometime-assistance from Homolka. In 1990, according to court testimony, Homolka and Bernardo drugged her younger sister Tammy, 15, with animal tranquilizers after a family Christmas dinner. He raped Tammy, who later died, apparently from choking on her own vomit.

A year later, Bernardo kidnapped Leslie Mahaffy, 14, from outside her house; in 1992 he took Kristen French, 15, from a church parking lot. Both were raped, videotaped and murdered with Homolka's help, according to court testimony. But in 1993, Bernardo beat Homolka with a flashlight, and she went to police, where their past began to unravel.

In what the news media dubbed "A Deal With the Devil," Homolka struck a bargain with prosecutors to plead guilty to two counts of manslaughter and testify against her husband. She had photos of her blackened eyes and portrayed herself as a battered wife forced to go along with the crimes.

After her sentencing, however, Bernardo's lawyer revealed that a police search of their home had missed six videotapes — hidden above a chandelier — that allegedly showed Homolka to be a more willing and enthusiastic participant in the crimes than she had said.

The public was outraged. It appeared that a clever young woman had duped the prosecutors and courts and gotten away with a light sentence, while her divorced husband is unlikely ever to be paroled.

There was "the overwhelming feeling that a grave injustice has been left to fester," wrote law professor Alan Young in the Toronto Star.

Such outrage helped earn Homolka two denials of parole, and she has served her entire sentence. But as her release date neared, prosecutors won "special conditions" on her release: She must report often to police, seek permission to travel, and may not have contact with anyone younger than 16.

She is appealing.