A sketch of Cody Legebokoff in court in Prince George, B.C. on Wednesday June 4, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Corey Hardeman PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. — He has such great regard for his own intellect, or so little for everyone else’s, that in the constantly evolving explanation of his criminal misdeeds, Cody Legebokoff is now testing the outer limits.
The accused serial killer Tuesday took the witness stand in his own defence to put before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Glen Parrett and a jury a nakedly self-serving version of what he belatedly now admits was his “involvement” in the slayings of three women and a legally blind teenager.
Charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Jill Stacey Stuchenko and Cynthia Frances Maas, both 35, Natasha Lynn Montgomery, 23, and Loren Donn Leslie, just 15, Legebokoff is pleading not guilty.
Yet with the two-plus-month-long trial winding to a close, his lawyer, Jim Heller, told the jurors in a brief opening statement, “He’s going to be admitting much, much that is incriminating and shocking.”
Cody Legebokoff’s defense lawyer James Heller. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Prince George Citizen-Brent Braaten
This 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 Stuchenko, Maas and 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 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,” Legebokoff said, and so he wouldn’t be identifying the men. “That’s not in the cards,” he said.
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.
Temple asked then that Legebokoff be cited for contempt, at which point the jurors were dismissed and court ended.
As for Leslie, 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.”
Victim Jill Stuchenko is shown in a court exhibit photo released at the trial of Cody Legebokoff in Prince George, B.C. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO
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, Legebokoff would be Canada’s youngest serial killer — he was just 19 when 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, Stuchenko among them, to party, Legobokoff said.
They all drank and smoked crack cocaine, then he and Stuchenko disappeared to his bedroom to have sex.
(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 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, Legebokoff said, “I had made the decision” to hand over a pipe by his tool box, 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 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 Maas.
A photo of murder victim Natasha Montgomery, who was allegedly killed by Cody Alan Legebokoff. HANDOUT/Christie Blatchford
Was he nervous, Heller asked, given that women tended to get dead when X came to his place?
“It was a year later,” Legebokoff replied, “so no, I didn’t.”
They were smoking crack when 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 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.”
A sketch of Cody Legebokoff in court in Prince George, B.C. on Wednesday June 4, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Corey Hardeman
But when they drove her to a nearby park and she fell out of the truck, Y said Maas was still alive.
Legebokoff pulled out a picaroon, a log-handling tool, and passed it to Y so he could “finish her off.”
Fast forward some unspecified time, and Legebokoff again found himself playing host to X, who arrived this time with Z and Montgomery.
The by now-familiar routine followed: They smoked crack, then when Montgomery went to the loo, X told him she was going to die.
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.”
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 Leslie’s death, the shorts he was wearing bore the DNA of at least one of the others.
Heller gave him myriad opportunities to express regret or sorrow, asking how he’d felt, even pushing him.
The closest 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.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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