Trial for accused B.C. serial killer could take up to a year

PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. – The trial of an accused B.C. serial killer could take up to a year, a courtroom heard on Monday.

Cody Alan Legebokoff, 21, is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of three women and a blind teenage girl.

Legebokoff appeared in court in Prince George on Monday with his head shaved and wearing red prison garb.

He has been behind bars since November 2010, when he was charged with killing 15-year-old Loren Leslie.

The legally blind teenager told her family she was going out for coffee with a friend and never returned.

Legebokoff was arrested after an RCMP officer from Fort St. James, B.C., spotted a truck turning out of a unused logging road the evening Leslie disappeared.

He pulled over and questioned the driver before calling in a conservation officer to investigate whether the man had been illegally hunting.

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The conservation official traced the tire tracks back down the logging road and found the teen dead in the snow. Leslie had been murdered just hours before, RCMP said at the time.

After an extensive investigation involving U.S. forensic experts, Legebokoff was charged in the deaths of Jill Stacey Stuchenko, Cynthia Frances Maas and Natasha Lynn Montgomery.

Stuchenko, 35, was reported missing in October 2009 and found dead four days later in a gravel pit on the outskirts of Prince George.

Maas, 35, and Montgomery, 23, were both reported missing on the same day in September 2010. Maas’s body was found in a Prince George park the following month but Montgomery’s body has never been found.

Police have not released details of how any of the women were killed.

Legebokoff was raised in Fort St. James, where he was arrested, and also lived in Lethbridge, Alta. He was an “avid user of social media and technology” where he was known by the moniker 1CountryBoy, RCMP said.

“Our investigation indicates he extensively utilized social media and online dating to correspond with friends, associates, potential girlfriends and others,” police said in an Oct. 17 news release announcing the latest charges.

Legebokoff was not on the RCMP’s “radar screen” before his unusual arrest just hours after Leslie’s slaying, police said.

He does not have a criminal record.

RCMP said Legebokoff is not a suspect in the 18 murders and disappearances along the so-called Highway of Tears because of his age.

The slayings along the highway that connects Prince George and Prince Rupert, B.C., date back to the 1970s.