At about 9:45 on the night of November 27, 2010, a rookie RCMP constable, Aaron Kehler, watched a 2004 GMC pickup pull out of a remote logging road onto Highway 27 in northern British Columbia and speed off erratically. It was odd, he thought, for anyone to be on that road so late in a frigid November, and he suspected poaching and pulled it over. In the truck he and a second officer found a multi-tool and a wrench covered in blood, a monkey backpack, and a wallet holding a children's hospital card in the name of Loren Leslie. The twenty-year-old driver, himself bloodied, said he had been poaching and had clubbed a deer to death: "I'm a redneck, that's what we do for fun." There was no deer in the truck. They arrested him under wildlife law and called in a conservation officer, who followed the tire tracks up the road and footprints in the fresh snow to the body of Loren Leslie, fifteen.
Cody Alan Legebokoff was born on January 21, 1990, and raised in Fort St. James, a small district municipality in rural British Columbia. Friends and family described a popular young man who played hockey and showed no sign of violence. He had a minor criminal record but was not on the local police's radar. After high school he lived briefly in Lethbridge, Alberta, then moved to Prince George, where he shared an apartment with three female friends, worked at a Ford dealership, and spent his spare time on the Canadian social network Nexopia under the name 1CountryBoy. By the prosecution's account he was addicted to cocaine and used sex workers to get it.
After his arrest DNA linked him to three earlier deaths. Jill Stuchenko, thirty-five, a mother of six, was last seen on October 9, 2009, and found four days later in a gravel pit on the outskirts of Prince George. Natasha Montgomery, twenty-three, a mother of two, was last seen on August 31 or September 1, 2010; her body has never been found, but her DNA was found in samples from his apartment, and she has been listed among the women suspected as victims of the Highway of Tears killings. Cynthia Maas, thirty-five, last seen on September 10, 2010, was found in a Prince George park the next month, dead of blunt-force trauma to the head and penetrating wounds, with a hole in her shoulder blade, a broken jaw and cheekbone and neck injuries consistent with stomping. The Crown said the three women had worked in the sex trade. Loren Leslie, who was legally blind, had apparently met him online through Nexopia; she too is counted among the Highway of Tears victims.
His trial on four counts of first-degree murder, delayed from September 2013 to June 2014, heard ninety-three Crown witnesses and Legebokoff himself. He pleaded not guilty and testified that he had been involved in three of the deaths but had not killed anyone; the killers, he said, were a drug dealer and two accomplices he would identify only as X, Y and Z. The Crown did not accept his attempt to plead to second-degree murder. On September 11, 2014, the jury convicted him on all four counts, and on September 16 Justice Glen Parrett of the Supreme Court of British Columbia sentenced him to life with no parole for twenty-five years and added him to the national sex offender registry, citing the sexual assaults and the degradation of the bodies. "He lacks any shred of empathy or remorse," the judge said. "He should never be allowed to walk among us again."
He appealed in February 2015 over the refusal to move the trial and over his legal representation, and in September 2016 all three judges of the British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld the verdict. He was held first at Kent Institution and in March 2019 was moved to Warkworth Institution. He is among the youngest convicted serial killers in Canada.