Allan Joseph Legere was born in Chatham Head, New Brunswick, on February 13, 1948, and had a long record of break-ins and violence. In 1986 he and two others broke into the home of John and Mary Glendenning, an elderly shopkeeping couple in Black River Bridge; John Glendenning was beaten to death and his wife raped and left for dead. Legere was convicted of second degree murder in 1987.
On May 3, 1989, being escorted to a hospital appointment in Moncton, he escaped from his guards using a hidden television aerial part and got into the woods. He stayed at large for seven months in a region he knew intimately, breaking into camps and houses for supplies, while the Miramichi valley locked itself down; people slept with guns, schools ran escorts, and the RCMP mounted the largest manhunt in the province's history.
During those months he killed four people: Annie Flam, seventy-five, a shopkeeper, in May; sisters Donna and Linda Daughney in October; and Father James Smith, a sixty-nine-year-old priest, in November. He beat and burned.
He was recaptured on November 24, 1989, on a road near Sunny Corner, after taking a taxi driver hostage. He was convicted of the four murders in November 1991 on DNA evidence from semen and hair, the first Canadian conviction to rest on it, and given four life sentences. He remains in custody and has been repeatedly refused release.