Cody Legebokoff: Canada's Accused "Country Boy" Killer
The Country Boy Killer?
Cody Legebokoff's family was well-known around Fort St. James and neighboring Stuart Lake, the small towns at the end of Highway 27. His mother's family, the Goodwins, owned one of Stuart Lake's three sawmills; they sold the company's timber rights in a multi-million dollar deal in 2009.
Legebokoff graduated from Fort St. James Secondary in 2008. His brother graduated a few years later; his sister is still there. His father was his hockey coach.
Grandfather Roy Goodwin tells the press that Cody was popular, a good boy who liked to fish for trout and hunt grouse. But an anonymous friend told Macleans that Cody Legebokoff has always had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Until 2010, that just meant he'd been in a few bar fights. He had no criminal record prior to accusations that he murdered four women.
He hadn't seemed like a young man with a vendetta against women. At the time of his arrest, not only was he dating a young lady who was studying at the College of New Caledonia, he was living with three female friends in Prince George.
Looking back, though, one friend points to at least one piece of potentially strange behavior. An anonymous source told the National Post that Legebokoff abruptly disappeared for a few weeks just before Loren Leslie's murder, and that he never explained his absence to friends.
Investigators led by Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Brendan Fitzpatrick are now sorting through Cody Legebokoff's 2009 and 2010 activities.
Authorities immediately charged Cory Legebokoff with first-degree murder after finding Loren Leslie's body. The three additional murder charges came on October 17, 2011. He's being held at the Prince George Regional Correctional Centre.
Legebokoff's use of social networking and dating sites and the text messages he sent from his Android phone are among the focuses of the Mounties' investigation. They spent weeks examining the truck he was driving when he was pulled over and searched the two homes he'd lived in. And they've sent the remains of Loren Leslie and Cynthia Maas to Pennsylvania for special forensic analysis not available in Canada.
Police are also reviewing unsolved crimes near Lethbridge, Alberta, where he lived during parts of 2008 and 2009.
A trial date isn't yet set, but Crown Prosecutor Lara Vizsolyi expects the trial to take six months or a year.
Meanwhile, Doug Leslie has founded the Loren Donn Leslie Foundation (LDLF.ca) to warn young people of the dangers lurking online in the form of strangers.