Christie Blatchford: Accused serial killer offers nakedly self serving version of his ‘involvement’ in women’s deaths

      

                
                    Handouts
                    HandoutsCody Legebokoff's alleged victims, clockwise from top left: Natasha Montgomery, Cynthia Maas,                       Loren Leslie and Jill Stuchenko.


Christie Blatchford: Accused serial killer offers nakedly self serving version of his ‘involvement’ in women’s deaths This Mr. Legebokoff did, albeit in his improbably chill manner, acknowledging that he was present and even assisting, a sort of butcher’s aide-de-camp, when Ms. Stuchenko, Ms. Maas and Ms. Montgomery were killed, but blaming the actual murders on various characters he identified only as X, Y and Z.

“There are three people, other people, involved in these charges,” he said. “I’m going to name them X, Y and Z.” He told Mr. Heller that “for what I’ve done, I know I can get a significant amount of jail time,” including in a federal prison, “and I will not go to federal penitentiary as a rat on three murder charges.”

Those who “give up names to cops are not treated with any respect in prison,” Mr. Legebokoff said, and so he wouldn’t be identifying the men. “That’s not in the cards,” he said.



Mr. Legebokoff, 24, refused to name the alleged men even when, late in the day, he was pressed to do so by prosecutor Joseph Temple and cautioned by the judge that complying wasn’t optional.

Mr. Temple asked then that Mr. Legebokoff be cited for contempt, at which point the jurors were dismissed and court ended.

As for Ms. Leslie, Mr. Legebokoff stuck to the final version of a story he gave the RCMP after his arrest — that she inexplicably had gone “psycho” after they’d met for the first time and had consensual sex, smashed herself in the face with a wrench and in the neck with a knife, and that all he’d done, as he told one of the investigators, was “…put her out of her misery.”

What he said in the stand, in that odd past-perfect voice he used throughout his evidence-in-chief, was, “I had seen the pipe wrench there and I had grabbed the pipe wrench and I had hit her with it.”

If convicted, Mr. Legebokoff would be Canada’s youngest serial killer — he was just 19 when Ms. Stuchenko was murdered — but by his own bizarre account, he is already surely the unluckiest man in the country.

It was the Saturday of the 2009 Thanksgiving weekend that X, one of his drug dealers, showed up at his house with six other people, Ms. Stuchenko among them, to party, Mr. Legobokoff said.

They all drank and smoked crack cocaine, then he and Ms. Stuchenko disappeared to his bedroom to have sex.

(Mr. Legebokoff would have the jury know he is so alluring that women are forever agreeing to sleep with him minutes after meeting him. Indeed, he said that after sex with Ms. Stuchenko, he wondered if she didn’t see him as “a future sugar daddy.”)

Later, after some of the people left, X told him “She was going to be killed because she owed a lot of money, so.”

Helpfully, Mr. Legebokoff said, “I had made the decision” to hand over a pipe by his toolbox, and then watched as X allegedly hit her with the pipe on the head, and then perhaps choked her. “A few minutes and it was done,” he said, and then, on X’s instructions, he and Y removed Ms. Stuchenko’s clothes, and X and Y “packed her up and out the door.”

The next day, as planned, he drove to Fort St. James to have Thanksgiving dinner with his parents and siblings. “I was a little bit shaken up,” he said, “but I tried to go on like nothing happened.”

Bets are he soldiered on nicely.

In September the following year, he had a new apartment, and again, X showed up to party, this time with Y and a woman named Cindy.

This was Ms. Maas.

Was he nervous, Mr. Heller asked, given that women tended to get dead when X came to his place?

“It was a year later,” Mr. Legebokoff replied, “so no, I didn’t.”

They were smoking crack when Ms. Maas and X got up and went to a corner of the small apartment and he heard a “cracking noise”. He was so concerned, why, he almost got up, was on the very edge of his seat when Y gave him a signal to stay put.

He watched as X whacked Ms. Maas with some sort of tool a few times, and soon enough, she wasn’t moving.

He helped Y pack her up, or, as he put it this time, “I took the responsibility of helping Y with getting her out.”

But when they drove her to a nearby park and she fell out of the truck, Y said Ms. Maas was still alive.

Mr. Legebokoff pulled out a pickaroon, a log-handling tool, and passed it to Y so he could “finish her off”.

Fast forward some unspecified time, and Mr. Legebokoff again found himself playing host to X, who arrived this time with Z and Ms. Montgomery.

The by now-familiar routine followed: They smoked crack, then when Ms. Montgomery went to the loo, X told him she was going to die.

Mr. Legebokoff did what he always did after a murder at his house — he attempted to clean up the place
Z pulled out a steel bar and passed it to X, who hit her with it, but she fought hard, and at some point, “Z asked for a knife and I supplied him with a knife. … He used it on her. He cut her throat.”

Mr. Legebokoff did what he always did after a murder at his house — he attempted to clean up the place.

It is worth noting he did this with almost magnificent ineptitude — the walls of his apartment, the furniture in it, and his clothes and shoes were speckled with the DNA of the three women, and on the night of Ms. Leslie’s death, the shorts he was wearing bore the DNA of at least one of the others.

Mr. Heller gave him myriad opportunities to express regret or sorrow, asking how he’d felt, even pushing him.

The closest Mr. Legebokoff could come was a few “I didn’t feel very good” and, once, this: “I kick myself in the ass every day … even then, I knew what I done wasn’t like right, but there wasn’t much I could do.”

The trial continues Wednesday.


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