In January 1982 Clifford Olson pleaded guilty to eleven counts of first-degree murder, the deaths of eight girls and three boys in the Vancouver area between November 1980 and July 1981. Within days Canadians learned what the police and the attorney general of British Columbia had paid for his cooperation: $100,000, held in trust for his wife and infant son. The payment made the case one of the most argued-over in Canadian legal history, and the argument was still running when Olson died of cancer in a Quebec penitentiary in 2011, at 71.
The nine cases that follow run from the Pacific coast to Nova Scotia and from 1980 to 2025. They are told roughly west to east. Their outcomes differ, and the wording of each outcome matters: one man pleaded guilty to eleven murders, another was never charged and was named only after he had died, a third was convicted of manslaughter in one province and murder in another. Several of the cases left something behind in how Canada polices, prosecutes and imprisons: a computer system for tracking violent offenders, a 1996 review that blamed systems rather than officers, a coroner’s jury’s view on shared prison cells, funding from two governments for the work the families sought.
Olson was 41 in the summer of 1981, a house renovator living in Coquitlam, with a long criminal record. The Canadian Press gives his first sentence, in 1957, as nine months for burglary, and reported that he escaped from custody at least six times. He was released from prison on mandatory supervision on September 7, 1980. Ten weeks later, on November 17, Christine Weller, 12, was killed in Surrey. Police did not at first treat her case as suspicious.
Nearly five months passed before the next death. Daryn Johnsrude, 16, a visitor from Saskatoon, was killed in late April 1981. His mother, Sharon Rosenfeldt, and his stepfather, Gary Rosenfeldt, became the most visible of the families over the following thirty years. "Daryn was a real live person, a young boy who deserved to live," his mother told CTV in 2010. Sandra Wolfsteiner, 16, of Langley, was killed on May 19, 1981, four days after Olson’s wedding. Ada Court, 13, was killed on June 21. Her sister, Trudy Court, later faced Olson at his parole hearings for three decades.
On July 2, 1981, Simon Partington, 9, of Surrey, was killed. His was the first case police acknowledged as foul play; until then, the Canadian Press reported, the young people had been classified as runaways. The last killings came close together. Sigrun Arnd, an 18-year-old visitor from Weinheim, in what was then West Germany, was killed in late July. Police identified her in September from dental charts supplied by her dentist in Germany, United Press International reported. Terri Lyn Carson, 15, and Louise Chartrand, 17, were killed in the days that followed, Chartrand on July 30. Hours earlier, according to the Canadian Press, RCMP investigators had met Olson and offered him money to act as an informant on unsolved murders. Judy Kozma, 14, and Raymond King Jr., 15, complete the eleven names. Three of the eleven were boys and eight were girls; the youngest was nine and the oldest eighteen.
Olson was arrested on Vancouver Island on August 12, 1981, after police who had been watching him saw him pick up two hitchhikers. He was charged with the first-degree murder of Judy Kozma; the Canadian Press dates that charge to August 18. By early September he faced nine counts, and ten when his trial began on January 11, 1982. He pleaded guilty to eleven. Justice H.C. McKay imposed eleven concurrent life sentences with no parole eligibility for 25 years and recommended that Olson never be released.
The most controversial part of the case came out of the weeks after the arrest. The Canadian Encyclopedia records that the attorney general, Allan Williams, agreed to a proposal made by Olson himself: $100,000 would be held in trust for his wife and infant son, and in return Olson would assist the investigation of ten of the killings, six victims still unaccounted for and four already known to police. Its public disclosure days after the pleas set off a national debate. A lawsuit by the victims' families over the money did not succeed.
The case also changed some practice. Police said years later, the Canadian Press reported in 2011, that the frustration of the Olson investigation led to a new computer system for tracking violent offenders, and CBC News listed a police tracking system for violent crimes among the changes that came out of it. The Canadian Press noted that police had met him hours before one of the killings, and that calls for an independent inquiry were ignored.
Olson claimed many more victims than the eleven. The figures he gave ranged from 69 to 168 killings in Canada and the United States. None was proven, and police investigated and largely dismissed them.
For thirty years he used court applications, letters and parole hearings to stay in the news. In August 1997 a jury in Surrey rejected his application under the faint-hope clause. The parole board denied him parole on July 18, 2006, and again on November 30, 2010. The families came to every hearing. The brother of one of the eleven, who had said nothing in public for thirty years, told CTV British Columbia in 2011 that the killing had "destroyed our family." Olson died on September 30, 2011, in the health care centre of the federal prison complex at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec.
Twenty-nine years after Olson’s arrest, northern British Columbia had a case of its own. Cody Alan Legebokoff grew up in Fort St. James, lived in Lethbridge, Alberta, from June 2008 to August 2009, and then moved to Prince George. He was 19 when the first killing took place, according to CBC News, and 20 when he was arrested. He had no criminal record. RCMP Inspector Brendan Fitzpatrick said in 2011 that Legebokoff had not been on the police "radar screen at all" before the night of his arrest, and police said he was a heavy user of social media who sometimes went by the handle "1CountryBoy."
The victims were Jill Stuchenko, 35, in October 2009; Natasha Montgomery, 23, originally from Quesnel, a mother of two; Cynthia Maas, 35, from a First Nations family; and Loren Leslie, 15, of Fraser Lake, killed on November 27, 2010. The RCMP described Stuchenko as a talented singer and a mother. At Legebokoff’s sentencing, Maas’s sister remembered "Cindy" with affection.
He was arrested near Vanderhoof on the night of November 27, 2010, and charged with Loren Leslie’s murder. At that point nothing connected him to the three women. A joint investigation by the North District Major Crime Unit and the Prince George RCMP, called Project E-Prelude, ran for ten months and drew on resources from police in the United States, the Vancouver Sun reported. In October 2011, while he was in custody, police announced three further counts of first-degree murder, in the deaths of Stuchenko and Maas and of Montgomery. Police said they believed he had acted alone. The Maas family issued a statement that began, "Murders do not just harm families." A chief of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council called the new charges "a good step forward."
His trial in the Supreme Court of British Columbia was put off several times. Justice Glen Parrett refused a defense application to move it from Prince George, finding that the defense had not shown that safeguards in jury selection could not deal with the risk of bias. He called a defense suggestion that interest in the case was concentrated in the region "disingenuous at best." His written reasons were not released until after the trial, and that timing later became part of the appeal. The jury returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on all four counts of first-degree murder shortly before 6 p.m. on September 11, 2014. A late attempt to plead guilty to second-degree murder had been refused because the Crown did not consent. Parrett sentenced him on September 16 to life on each count, concurrent, with no parole eligibility for 25 years.
The British Columbia Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on September 26, 2016, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal on February 16, 2017. The prison system supplied a second chapter. In early 2019 Legebokoff was moved from the maximum-security Kent Institution in Agassiz to the medium-security Warkworth Institution in Ontario, and the local member of Parliament, Todd Doherty, campaigned publicly to have him returned to maximum security. The Prince George Citizen drew the same comparison in 2023, when the transfer of Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison set off a similar protest.
John Martin Crawford was convicted of killing four Indigenous women on the prairies: one in Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1981, and three near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1992. The first death brought a manslaughter conviction. The second set of deaths brought convictions in 1996 on one count of first-degree murder and two of second-degree murder. He was still serving the life sentence when he died in the Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon on December 16, 2020, at 58. The cause of death was not released.
The case drew little notice outside Saskatchewan. A Saskatoon journalist, Warren Goulding, asked why, and the book he published in 2001, Just Another Indian: A Serial Killer and Canada’s Indifference, argued that race, geography, incompetence and economics all played a part. Christine Schmidt, writing in the Canadian Book Review Annual, observed that limited coverage had left Crawford "a virtually anonymous figure."
Mary Jane Serloin was 35 when she died in Lethbridge in 1981. Her family lived in Brocket, Alberta. Crawford was sentenced on June 16, 1982, to 10 years for manslaughter. Windspeaker’s review of Goulding’s book reported that the sentencing judge described his "callous disregard" for her as one of the most troubling parts of the case, and that her family felt shut out. Her sister told Goulding: "They didn’t even have the decency to let me know what was going on." Reports differ on how long he served. Global News said seven years, Windspeaker said five, and the release is placed in 1989.
By 1990 Crawford was living in Saskatoon. Windspeaker’s summary of Goulding’s research lists a series of encounters with police in 1992: a woman reported to police in May that he had assaulted her, and his mother posted $4,000 bail on June 18; in October he was charged with attempted murder of a Saskatoon man, and the outcome of that charge has not been reported. He spent most of 1993 in the Saskatoon Correctional Centre for another assault. In 1992 three young First Nations women from Saskatchewan communities died: Calinda Waterhen, 22, of Loon Lake; Eva Taysup, of the Yellow Quill reserve; and Shelley Napope, 16, described in 1995 as being from Duck Lake. Taysup’s age was reported as 28 in 1995 and as 30 in 2020.
For two years nobody put a name to the three. Calinda Waterhen’s father had gone to the RCMP in May 1993 and again in October 1994, and he was told, Windspeaker reported, that she was somewhere in Saskatchewan and that her health card was still being used. In the autumn of 1994 an anthropologist at the University of Saskatchewan, Ernie Walker, worked on composite sketches that were released to the media across the province and nationally. "He was the catalyst for the identification," an RCMP corporal, Jerry Walker, said. Taysup was identified from dental records after an acquaintance called the RCMP, and Napope after the composite drawings were released in November. Waterhen’s identification was made public in January 1995. The investigation took about four months, involved the RCMP and Saskatoon city police, and drew more than 3,000 tips. Three months earlier, an RCMP crime prevention coordinator named Wilde told the paper, police had no identities and no leads; now, he said, "they’re identified and we have a suspect."
Crawford was arrested in Saskatoon on January 19, 1995, and charged with three counts of first-degree murder. According to the Windspeaker review, the RCMP had kept him under surveillance for four months in 1994. During that period, the review said, he assaulted a woman. Officers gave conflicting evidence at the 1995 preliminary hearing about whether she was hurt, and police later said they had not known she was at risk and had held back a public warning to build their case. Nearly six years afterward she filed a claim against the RCMP alleging negligence.
He was tried in 1996 and convicted of first-degree murder on one count and second-degree murder on the other two; which death carried the first-degree count has not been reported. Correctional Service Canada recorded the life sentence as beginning on May 30, 1996. The trial judge, David Wright, spoke at length when he passed sentence, according to a 2016 feature by Laura Robinson in Truthdig. He listed the reasons he believed Crawford had picked the three women, beginning with their youth, the fact that they were women and the fact that they were Native. He said Crawford "seemed determined to destroy every vestige of their humanity," and that "the accused has shown no remorse, absolutely none, no regrets." The prosecutor, Terry Hinz, told Goulding he saw no reason why the Paul Bernardo case "should have received more publicity than the John Martin Crawford case."
Shelley Napope’s family said the same thing from the other side. Her aunt told Alberta Sweetgrass that the media "never even once took the time to come and ask us," and that police had given the family "false statements and false hope." In 2003 the Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women gave Goulding a social justice award, and relatives of Taysup and Napope attended the ceremony in Edmonton. "It’s been eight years, but it still hurts," Napope’s aunt said. Goulding said his aim "was to make this book a tribute to the women and not in doing a true crime story."
Jeremy Skibicki was convicted on July 11, 2024, of the first-degree murders of four First Nations women in Winnipeg: Ashlee Shingoose, 30; Morgan Harris, 39; Marcedes Myran, 26; and Rebecca Contois, 24. Police said they died between mid-March and mid-May 2022. Skibicki, then 35, was arrested on May 18, 2022, and charged with Contois’s death; on December 1, 2022, the Homicide Unit, working with Manitoba Justice, charged him with three more counts of first-degree murder, for Harris, Myran and a woman police could not yet identify. Announcing them, Police Chief Danny Smyth said: "It is always unsettling when there is any kind of a serial killing." The Crown did not lay hate crime charges, police confirmed, although Grand Chief Jerry Daniels of the Southern Chiefs' Organization had urged prosecutors to do so.
For most of the trial the fourth woman had no name in court. Indigenous community members called her Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, Buffalo Woman, and she was identified as Ashlee Shingoose only in March 2025, after Skibicki gave investigators new information, the Winnipeg Police Service announced on March 26, 2025. She was a member of the St. Theresa Point Anisininew Nation. Harris and Myran were of Long Plain First Nation, and Contois of O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation.
The case became a policy dispute well before the verdict. In December 2022 the police chief, Danny Smyth, set out what police would and would not do for the families of Harris and Myran, and First Nations leaders called for his resignation; on December 14 he apologized to leaders and families. Harris’s relatives spoke on Parliament Hill. An Indigenous-led committee studied what the families were asking for and reported on May 12, 2023; on July 5, 2023, the provincial Progressive Conservative government said it was too risky, and the question moved into the provincial election campaign. The federal minister, Gary Anandasangaree, called the politicizing of the issue "deeply offensive and deeply troubling and deeply hurtful to the families." The New Democrats won in October 2023, and on March 22, 2024, the federal and Manitoba governments each committed $20 million to the work the families had sought. Harris and Myran were both identified in 2025.
The trial itself turned on one question. On May 6, 2024, defense lawyer Leonard Tailleur told the court that Skibicki admitted unlawfully causing the deaths of all four women. The jury was dismissed and the Crown agreed to a judge-alone trial, saying it was "the best route to making sure this matter proceeds." The defense argued that he was not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder, and under Canadian law the burden of proof for that argument fell on the defense. Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench rejected it in a written decision of nearly 200 pages, ruled the killings planned and deliberate, and wrote that the crimes were "emblematic of much of what is associated with the tragedies" of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.
At the sentencing hearing on August 28, 2024, the court heard 14 victim impact statements. A federal law that had allowed parole ineligibility periods to be stacked for multiple murders had been struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2022, so the four life terms ran concurrently, with no parole eligibility for 25 years; Crown prosecutors said he could apply at 60. Marcedes Myran’s grandmother said she would never speak his name. The prosecutor, Chris Vanderhooft, said sentencing hearings often treat victims as "but a footnote," and that this one would not. A special post-sentence hearing for Shingoose’s family followed on August 15, 2025.
Paul Bernardo was convicted on September 1, 1995, of the first-degree murders of two Ontario schoolgirls, Leslie Mahaffy, 14, of Burlington, and Kristen French, 15, of St. Catharines. Leslie was taken in June 1991 and Kristen on April 16, 1992. A jury in Toronto convicted him on all nine counts he faced, which included kidnapping and forcible confinement as well as the two murders, and two months later, on November 3, he was declared a dangerous offender, which makes his life sentence indeterminate. He was 30.
Before the murders, from May 1987, a series of assaults on young women in Scarborough, the east end of Toronto, had gone unsolved. Public Safety Canada’s 2015 summary puts the total at no fewer than 18 women in three police jurisdictions. Metropolitan Toronto Police formed a task force in November 1988 and, with help from the FBI, produced an offender profile, according to The Walrus. A composite drawing published in 1990 brought in about 16,000 responses, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, and three of them said the man looked like Paul Bernardo; The Walrus puts the total number of tips at about 41,000. Detectives interviewed Bernardo in November 1990 and took a sample for DNA testing. He was polite and cooperative, and investigators judged him an unlikely suspect. His sample joined those of more than 200 other suspects at the Centre of Forensic Sciences, a laboratory with very limited staff at the time. It sat there for more than two years. When it was finally matched to the Scarborough assaults in early 1993, Bernardo was arrested on February 17, and three girls were dead: Tammy Homolka, 15, the sister of his then fiancee, Karla Homolka, in December 1990, and Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Accounts disagree on the legal outcome of Tammy Homolka’s death. Since 2018 The Canadian Press and outlets using its reports have repeatedly said that Bernardo was convicted of manslaughter in her death; no court record confirming that has come to light, and the nine counts of 1995 did not include it.
Justice Archie Campbell examined the police work for the Ontario government and reported in 1996. His conclusion, in short, was that the system had failed rather than any one officer. "It is often the case that systemic failures as opposed to individual mistakes are the real cause of public disasters," he wrote. "The Bernardo case shows that the motivation, investigative skill and the dedication of officers is not enough." The work of skilled investigators, he concluded, could be defeated by the lack of an effective case management system, and he added: "We seem to be incapable of learning from previous experiences." Public Safety Canada later summarized his central finding as a lack of "cooperation, coordination and communication between police and other justice system partners."
The case also left behind three disputes about the justice system itself. The first was the plea agreement with Karla Homolka. Her lawyers and the Ontario Attorney General’s office reached it in May 1993: the province would not grant her immunity, but agreed not to pursue more serious charges against her, and in return she would testify against Bernardo and plead guilty to two counts of manslaughter. On July 6, 1993, she did, and received two concurrent sentences of 12 years. Critics called it a "deal with the devil." A petition with more than 300,000 names was delivered to the Ontario legislature, and an independent inquiry concluded in 1996, in a report by Galligan, that on what the Crown knew in 1993 it "had absolutely no choice" but to make the agreement if it wanted to be sure of convicting Bernardo. A 1997 Maclean’s report on the provincial review said the Crown would not have agreed to the deal had prosecutors had the videotapes.
The second dispute was the tapes themselves. On May 6, 1993, Bernardo’s lawyer, Ken Murray, retrieved six eight-millimeter videotapes in St. Catharines on his client’s instructions. He kept them for about 16 or 17 months, until he stopped acting for Bernardo in September 1994, and gave them to his successor, John Rosen, who turned them over to prosecutors. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives the handover date as September 22, 1994. The tapes contradicted Homolka’s account of herself as a coerced participant. By then her plea agreement had been carried out.
The third reached a man who was never a suspect in the murders. In 1987 a 15-year-old girl in Toronto was assaulted, and a man known by the initials A.H. was convicted of the offense. In 1989, on his lawyer’s advice, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years less a day. He has said the case rested on a mistaken identification by the girl’s mother, who had seen the assailant only briefly early in the morning. Years later Bernardo admitted the crime to police. CBC News reported that police knew of the admission by 2006. In June 2008 three judges of the Court of Appeal for Ontario formally acquitted A.H. "There has been a miscarriage of justice," Justice Marc Rosenberg said. Crown counsel Howard Leibovich told the court that the fresh evidence pointed to only one conclusion, that Bernardo had committed the offense. A.H.'s lawyer, James Lockyer, said the case showed how unreliable eyewitness identification can be.
Bernardo spent 18 years in Kingston Penitentiary and was then moved to Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison, in 2013. The Parole Board of Canada refused him parole on October 17, 2018, on June 22, 2021, and on November 26, 2024. At the last of those hearings Ryan Mahaffy, Leslie’s brother, called her "mentor and best friend," and Kristen’s mother, Donna French, said: "They say that time heals but I don’t for a minute believe that, for I have not healed." On May 29, 2023, he was moved to La Macaza Institution in Quebec, a medium-security prison, which set off a public outcry. A Correctional Service of Canada review published on July 20, 2023, called the decision "sound." A hearing set for October 20, 2026, was reported postponed to January 2027.
Camille Cleroux pleaded guilty in an Ottawa courtroom in June 2012 to killing three women over about twenty years. The first was his wife, Lise Roy, who was 27 and who was killed in 1990. The second was Jean Rock, the woman he lived with afterward, who was 32 and was killed in 2003. The third was Paula Leclair, 64, a neighbor, who refused, the Crown said, to let him have her apartment. Justice Lynn Ratushny of the Ontario Superior Court accepted his pleas to first-degree murder for Leclair and second-degree murder for Roy and Rock, and he received a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Neither of the two earlier women had ever been reported to police as missing. Relatives believed they had moved away and cut off contact, and in Rock’s case letters in her name kept arriving for years after her death. The court heard about the letters to her family and about a false story of a lottery win. The deaths came to light because of the third. In late May 2010, Leclair’s son encountered a man he did not know who was living in her apartment. Within days, Cleroux was charged with her murder, and within about three weeks, while he was held at the Ottawa Carleton Regional Detention Centre, police had charged him in the other two deaths.
He was 56 when first charged, according to CTV News, and 58 when he pleaded guilty. The Crown described him as a former dishwasher, and the court heard that he had planned the deaths of three women, CTV reported; Correctional Service Canada recorded the sentence as beginning on June 26, 2012. He died in custody of apparent natural causes on January 17, 2021, as an inmate of Pacific Institution in Abbotsford, British Columbia.
The details that sources disagree on are small but telling. CTV called Rock his second wife, his ex-wife and his common-law wife; police said only Roy had ever been legally married to him. A CTV report on his death gave 2013 as the year of Rock’s death, a year after he had pleaded guilty to killing her; every other account says 2003. An Agence France-Presse story said he was sentenced to life and, later, to 25 years "according to local media"; the record is a life sentence with no parole for 25 years.
The Toronto Police Service and the Ontario Provincial Police announced on December 11, 2025, that DNA and investigative genetic genealogy had identified a man who died in 2019 as the person they believe killed three women in Ontario: Christine Prince, 25, who came from Wales, in 1982; Claire Samson, 23, in 1983; and Gracelyn Greenidge, 41, originally from Barbados, in 1997. His name was Kenneth Smith. He died in Windsor, Ontario, aged 72, in a cancer hospice, six years before police named him. He was never arrested and never charged, and what follows is what police say they believe. The Centre of Forensic Sciences made the final DNA comparison on December 3, 2025.
Police said the three women had no link to one another or to Smith that investigators could find, and described the killings as crimes of opportunity. They said there might be other victims who had not been identified. Smith had a record. According to The Associated Press, he had been jailed at least once before the first two killings and at least twice before the third. His convictions all came before Canada’s national DNA data bank came into force, which is why his profile never matched anything on file. If he were alive, police said, Toronto police would arrest him for the deaths of Prince and Greenidge and the OPP would arrest him for the death of Samson. Samson’s case came under OPP jurisdiction because it fell in Oro-Medonte Township, north of Toronto.
In January 2018 the Toronto Police Service had offered a reward of up to $50,000 for information in the 1997 case. The identification, when it came, rested on DNA and investigative genetic genealogy. Othram, the genetic genealogy company involved, described it as the 21st publicly announced Ontario case solved with its technology.
Allan Legere was convicted of five murders in New Brunswick. The first was the killing of John Glendenning, 66, at Black River Bridge in June 1986. A jury convicted Legere of second-degree murder on January 22, 1987, and he was sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for 18 years; two co-accused had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He appealed. On August 5, 1988, the New Brunswick Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal, noting that police had infringed his Charter rights in taking hair samples in 1986 but declining to exclude the evidence, because officers had acted on Crown advice and the law as it stood and the evidence was important to identification. The Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal on October 12, 1989, while he was at large.
He was at large because on May 3, 1989, unarmed guards from the Atlantic Institution, the maximum-security penitentiary at Renous, took him to a hospital in Moncton for treatment of an ear infection, and he escaped. The Correctional Service of Canada convened a board of investigation and issued its report that year. In August 1990 a jury in Moncton convicted him of escape and of kidnapping a woman during it; he received nine years, to run at the same time as the life term. For about seven months he was hunted. A chronology kept in the University of New Brunswick’s law library archive describes one of the largest manhunts in RCMP history. In mid-June Crime Stoppers offered a $2,000 reward, and over the summer police received about 50 reported sightings, some as far away as Fredericton and Toronto. Residents of the Miramichi left their outdoor lights burning all night, and the lights are still called the "Legere lights."
Four people died during the manhunt. Annie Flam, 75, died in Chatham on May 28, 1989, twenty-five days after the escape. Donna Daughney, 45, and her sister Linda Daughney, 41, died in Newcastle on October 13, 1989. James Smith, 69, died in Chatham Head on November 15. The RCMP took over the Flam investigation from the Chatham town police. At the time of the Flam killing, no Canadian laboratory was doing DNA casework, and early attempts to compare the evidence with older material connected to Legere failed, according to the archive’s papers. Frank McKenna, who was New Brunswick’s premier during the manhunt and had earlier worked as a defense lawyer, told CTV News in 2026 that he had known the victims personally and had represented the Flam family.
Legere was recaptured on November 24, 1989, ending a 201-day manhunt. On December 5, 1990, he was indicted directly on four counts of first-degree murder. At Burton, near Fredericton, a jury convicted him of all four on November 3, 1991, and he was declared a dangerous offender. The case was one of the first in Canada in which DNA evidence was central to a murder conviction, and the New Brunswick Court of Appeal upheld the use of that evidence on December 16, 1994.
The prison file ran for decades. He was held in the Special Handling Unit at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, and moved to Edmonton Institution in 2015. The Parole Board of Canada refused him parole on January 13, 2021, and again in a written decision reported on December 22, 2025; the board said all of his crimes had been committed either while he was on mandatory release or after he had escaped. A parole decision released in January 2021 said he had tried to escape twice in 1987. The Renous warden, Don Wheaton, described a "Jekyll-and-Hyde personality" that Legere kept hidden while in the institution. Legere died in custody at Edmonton Institution on March 9, 2026, aged 78. CTV headlined the reaction in the Miramichi as "a collective sigh of relief."
Michael Wayne McGray grew up in the Yarmouth area of Nova Scotia and pleaded guilty, in a string of proceedings between 2000 and 2011, to seven murders. They were Elizabeth Gale Tucker, 17, near Weymouth, Nova Scotia, in May 1985; Mark Daniel Gibbons in Saint John, New Brunswick, in November 1987; Robert Assaly and Gaetan Ethier in Montreal over Easter weekend 1991; Joan Hicks and her 11-year-old daughter, Nina, in Moncton in 1998; and in November 2010 his cellmate, Jeremy Phillips, 33, in British Columbia. He claimed to have killed as many as 16 people across North America. Police could confirm far fewer.
For years none of the cases were connected. Tucker’s killing stayed unsolved until 2001. In 1991 McGray was serving a robbery sentence at La Macaza, a medium-security prison in Quebec, and was out on a temporary pass at Easter. He did not return. According to the Halifax Examiner he was at large for 21 days. Police did not know he had been in Montreal at all, and the two Montreal killings stayed unsolved, and a Montreal activist, Michael Hendricks, had pressed police since 1991 to consider that possibility.
McGray was arrested in 1998 and charged in the deaths of Joan and Nina Hicks, after police acted on a tip from an informant. He was held at the Atlantic Institution at Renous and kept in segregation from 1998. From there he began to talk. He wrote to the Crown prosecutor in Moncton and spoke to police in an effort, The Canadian Encyclopedia says, to improve his prison conditions. About a year and a half after his arrest, CBC News reported that Codiac RCMP were holding a possible serial killer; McGray, then 34, had talked while awaiting trial about other killings, and police said details he gave could be checked in Montreal and Saint John. Montreal police planned to charge him in the deaths of Assaly and Ethier, and New Brunswick police began reopening old files.
He underwent a 60-day psychiatric evaluation, which concluded that he had a severe form of Tourette syndrome and linked it to his urge to kill, The Canadian Encyclopedia reports. On April 25, 2000, he was due in a Montreal courtroom only to set a date for a preliminary hearing. Instead he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, against the advice of his lawyer, who had asked for a psychiatric evaluation. "I’m already doing 25, so it don’t change nothing," he told the Quebec Superior Court, as Xtra reported it. He had already pleaded guilty to murdering Joan Hicks and received a life sentence with no parole eligibility for 25 years. The charge in Nina’s death was stayed at first. Days before his plea in the Tucker case, in 2001, CBC News reported, he pleaded guilty to the 1998 murder of the 11-year-old girl.
Two aspects of the case reached beyond his own sentences. In a letter written in 2003 from segregation, reported by the Halifax Examiner, McGray wrote that a fellow inmate could be a "suitable victim." In November 2010, at a medium-security prison in Agassiz, British Columbia, he killed Phillips, the man assigned to share his cell. He was given another life sentence, and in 2012 he said he would kill again. A British Columbia coroner’s jury reported on October 31, 2012, recommending that inmates serving time for multiple murders should not be made to share cells, the Canadian Press reported.
The other consequence came from a different province and a different decade. In 2019 documents released in the case of Glen Assoun, who spent almost 17 years in prison for the 1995 death of Brenda Way in Halifax, showed that an RCMP analyst had named McGray as a possible suspect. The federal justice minister ordered a new trial for Assoun on March 1, 2019, after a conviction review, and in July 2019 Nova Scotia’s justice minister called the case a "miscarriage of justice." The Canadian Press reported that evidence connected to a possible serial killer had been destroyed. McGray was never charged in Way’s death.
Set side by side, the nine cases are different kinds of record. One ended with eleven guilty pleas and a payment that Canadians argued about for thirty years. Two went to juries on contested trials. One was decided by a judge after the accused conceded the deaths and argued only about his mind. One was never tried at all: the man was named by police six years after his death.
The cases keep returning to delay, measured in different units. A DNA sample sat for more than two years at a laboratory in Ontario. Police treated several of Olson’s early cases as runaways until July 1981. Two women in Ottawa were killed years before anyone counted them, and three Saskatchewan women went unnamed for two years. Gracelyn Greenidge’s case waited 28 years for a name. Where a reform is recorded, it is procedural: a tracking system for violent offenders, a case management finding, a recommendation on shared cells, two governments' agreement to fund the work the families sought.
The families, in nearly every case, are the ones who stay. Sharon Rosenfeldt sat through Olson’s hearings. Debbie Mahaffy has opposed Bernardo’s release at each of his. Shelley Napope’s aunt drove seven hours to Edmonton to see a journalist honored. The record of these cases is kept, to a large degree, by the people who go to the hearings.
• 1957: Clifford Olson receives his first sentence, nine months for burglary (Canadian Press).
• September 7, 1980: Olson is released from prison on mandatory supervision.
• November 17, 1980: Christine Weller, the first of Olson’s eleven victims, is killed.
• July 2, 1981: Simon Partington, 9, is killed; police first acknowledge foul play.
• August 12, 1981: Olson is arrested on Vancouver Island.
• 1981: Mary Jane Serloin dies in Lethbridge; John Crawford is sentenced for manslaughter on June 16, 1982.
• January 1982: Olson pleads guilty to eleven counts of first-degree murder.
• 1985: Elizabeth Tucker, 17, is killed near Weymouth, Nova Scotia (McGray).
• June 1986: John Glendenning is killed at Black River Bridge, New Brunswick.
• January 22, 1987: Allan Legere is convicted of second-degree murder in the Glendenning case.
• May 1987: A series of assaults on young women begins in Scarborough, Ontario (Bernardo).
• May 3, 1989: Legere escapes from custody in Moncton.
• May 28 to November 15, 1989: Four people die in the Miramichi region during the manhunt.
• November 24, 1989: Legere is recaptured.
• November 1990: Toronto police take Bernardo’s DNA sample.
• December 1990 to April 1992: Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French die.
• Easter 1991: Robert Assaly and Gaetan Ethier are killed in Montreal (McGray).
• November 3, 1991: Legere is convicted of four counts of first-degree murder.
• 1992: Three First Nations women die near Saskatoon (Crawford).
• February 17, 1993: Bernardo is arrested.
• July 6, 1993: Karla Homolka pleads guilty to two counts of manslaughter.
• January 19, 1995: Crawford is arrested in Saskatoon.
• September 1, 1995: Bernardo is convicted; he is declared a dangerous offender on November 3.
• 1996: Justice Archie Campbell reports on the Bernardo investigation; Crawford is convicted; the life sentence begins May 30.
• August 1997: A jury in Surrey rejects Olson’s faint-hope application.
• 1998: Joan and Nina Hicks are killed in Moncton; McGray is arrested. On April 25, 2000, he pleads guilty in Montreal.
• 2001: McGray pleads guilty in the Tucker case; Goulding’s book on Crawford is published.
• October 2009 to November 27, 2010: Legebokoff’s four victims die.
• May 2010: Paula Leclair’s death leads to charges against Camille Cleroux in June.
• November 2010: McGray kills his cellmate in British Columbia.
• September 30, 2011: Olson dies of cancer.
• June 2012: Cleroux pleads guilty. October 31, 2012: a coroner’s jury recommends against shared cells for multiple murderers.
• September 11, 2014: Legebokoff is convicted of four counts of first-degree murder.
• March 1, 2019: A new trial is ordered for Glen Assoun.
• 2019: Kenneth Smith dies in Windsor, Ontario.
• December 16, 2020: John Crawford dies in custody.
• January 17, 2021: Cleroux dies in custody.
• May 18, 2022: Skibicki is arrested.
• July 11, 2024: Skibicki is convicted; sentenced August 28.
• November 26, 2024: Bernardo is denied parole a third time.
• December 11, 2025: Police name Kenneth Smith.
• March 9, 2026: Legere dies in custody.