A Fort St. James RCMP officer described to the court Tuesday how a convergence of circumstances led to the arrest of Cody Alan Legebokoff on the first of the four murder charges he is now facing.
Cst. Aaron Kehler said he was driving south along Highway 27 on the night of Nov. 27, 2010 to meet up with a Vanderhoof RCMP officer to pass on a purse left behind at a motor vehicle incident earlier that day when, at about 9 p.m., he noticed some headlights bobbing to the east.
Initially, he thought it was a snowmobile, but as he came down a hill and onto a plateau, Kehler said he saw what turned out to be a pickup truck make its way along a logging road that angled onto the highway "with urgency, in a quick manner" and continue south at a high speed.
Kehler "paced" the pickup and gave the Vanderhoof officer Cst. K.P. Sidhu, the heads up via his vehicle's computer that something was not right and he planned to pull the truck over but only once they had crossed paths.
With backup no closer than 30 minutes away, Kehler said he wanted Sidhu there as a precaution due to the remote location and the possibility the driver had a firearm or other weapon.
When Kehler pulled the pickup over just north of a landfill alongside the two-lane highway, the driver had his registration and licence sticking out the window before he reached the vehicle. Kehler thought it was a "weird thing" because it was a first in the roughly 100 roadside stops he had conducted in the slightly more than a year he had worked in Fort St. James.
It got stranger from there, Kehler testified, as one of his first observations upon looking inside the cab was the driver, Legebokoff, was wearing a sweater and shorts, despite the temperature being minus five to minus 10 C with freshly fallen snow.
"To me, I'm wearing long johns and a full police uniform," Kehler said. "I don't really get cold too much but that was odd to me because of the temperature."
As he advised Legebokoff he had been pulled over for speeding, Kehler said he noticed what appeared to be a smear of blood on his left chin and then speckles or droplets of blood on his thighs.
Then he saw a beer can directly behind the driver's seat and asked Legebokoff to get out of the truck so he could conduct a search for a possible liquor violation. Legebokoff complied and Kehler said he noticed more blood on his legs and then a red puddle on a driver's side rubber floor mat.
Legebokoff agreed to Kehler's suggestion he would probably be warmer in the back of his RCMP vehicle while he and Sidhu searched the pickup. Kehler did a quick patdown and found a cellphone with a checkered backing in the back of one of Legebokoff's pockets. And when Legebokoff got into the RCMP vehicle, Kehler said he noticed a crew pocket in his shorts with something heavy inside. Kehler said he pulled out a multitool covered in gelled blood and put it on the hood of his vehicle.
Following a conversation with Legebokoff - Kehler did not provide the details - he asked Sidhu to call in a conservation officer to help investigate a possible poaching incident. Kehler then told Legebokoff they would be searching his vehicle.
Upon opening the passenger side door, Kehler said he noticed a small backpack with a stuffed monkey attached to the back on the passenger side seat. Immediately believing it was not Legebokoff's, he checked inside and found a wallet and, inside that, a blue medical card that turned out to belong to Loren Donn Leslie.
Further searching uncovered a four-pack of "Mudslides, two of them partially empty," and another four pack of "White Russians" with two of them missing. Kehler said the area behind the seats was packed full of work clothing almost up to the shoulder rests of the seats.
In the area behind the centre console, he found a pipe wrench with clumps of snow mixed with a bit of blood on the tool. That prompted him to think Legebokoff was involved in "something more recent than I was led to believe."
Kehler said he also came across a Brillo pad sponge, often used as a filter in crack pipes, and, as he grabbed the pipe wrench to remove it from the pickup, he found two wire filters, burnt and in cylinder form, that looked like they had been inside a crack pipe. He opened up the centre console right below the pipe wrench and noticed two more crack pipes.
As he read Legebokoff his Charter rights for the poaching charge, Kehler said Legebokoff told him he knew what he did was wrong and it was the first time this year he had committed such an act, although he did poach a couple times in the previous year.
"I asked him if he poaches a lot and he replied to me that 'yeah, I'm a redneck, that's what we do for fun,'" Kehler said.
Legebokoff went on to say he was with a friend who shot a mule deer with a .306 rifle from the window of his truck. Legebokoff said the deer ran off but they caught up to it and took turns clubbing it to death before dragging it back to his friend's truck.
And while his friend left with the deer, Legebokoff said he drove up towards Fort St. James but took a detour to check out a hunting area his grandfather told him about. Kehler said he told Legebokoff he had a hard time believing that because it was dark out and therefore difficult to see the lay of the land.
Legebokoff became agitated, Kehler said, and claimed he had just killed a few grouse in the area.
Kehler said he commented that people who take turns clubbing a deer sometimes turn into serial killers.
"And that's when he said to me, 'I'm trying to change, I'm trying to find new friends, I'm trying to get new friends,'" Kehler said.
When Kehler asked him about the backpack, he said Legebokoff told him it was owned by a friend of his girlfriend's but did not know her name. He also said the crack pipes belonged to friends before Kehler took them out and destroyed them by grinding them into the ground with his shoe.
He said Legebokoff was arrested for poaching at about 10:30 p.m. and the conservation officer was on the scene at about 11 p.m.
After a conversation with Legebokoff and then the RCMP officers, the conservation officer left to retrace the route the pickup truck had taken. By that time, police also had reason to believe Leslie was a missing person and were trying to track down her parents, which was complicated by the fact there was a different surname was on the medical card.
Kehler then contacted the conservation officer and asked if he found what was expected and if everything was OK.
"He replied back to me that it was the worst case scenario," said Kehler, who then called Fort St. James RCMP to summon another member with investigative tools.
In an opening statement given to the jury on Monday, Crown prosecutor Joseph Temple contended the 15-year-old Leslie's body was found on that night near a gravel pit in a shallow depression covered by some bush off Highway 27.
Temple also said Legebokoff, now 24, is now charged with the murders of Jill Stacey Stuchenko and Cynthia Frances Maas, both 35, and Natasha Lynn Montgomery, 23, as a result of the investigation that followed. The allegations are yet to be proven in court.
The trial continues today at the Prince George courthouse.
