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Expert details blood findings

An expert in blood pattern analysis presented her findings to the court Wednesday from the crime scenes related to Cody Allan Legebokoff, the young man accused of murdering a teenage girl and three women.
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RCMP Sgt. Beverly Zaporozan, blood stain pattern anlyst.

An expert in blood pattern analysis presented her findings to the court Wednesday from the crime scenes related to Cody Allan Legebokoff, the young man accused of murdering a teenage girl and three women.

Showing photos of personal items seized from Legebokoff on the night of his arrest, Sgt. Beverly Zaporozan of the RCMP's National Forensic Service showed where blood matching Loren Donn Leslie was found on his shoes, shorts, shirt and jacket.

Legebokoff was arrested on Nov. 27, 2010 shortly after a conservation officer had found the still-warm but lifeless body of the legally-blind 15-year-old girl in a bushy spot near a gravel pit off Highway 27 between Vanderhoof and Fort St. James.

A Fort St. James RCMP officer had pulled Legebokoff over after seeing him driving erratically as he turned onto the highway from the logging road leading back to the site. When blood was noticed on Legebokoff and his truck, a conservation officer was called in to retrace his route after he told the officer he had been poaching.

When the conservation officer found Leslie's body, Legebokoff was arrested on a charge of murder.

Leslie's blood was not the only blood found on the items seized. Blood from Natasha Lynn Montgomery, 23, who went missing in September 2010, was also found on a pair of shorts Legebokoff had been wearing at the time of his arrest despite the winter weather.

And blood on the heel and a ball of a sock seized from Legebokoff was identified as coming from Cynthia Maas, 35, whose body was found in L.C. Gunn Park on Oct. 9, 2010.

Testimony moved onto findings gleaned from the samples and photos from Legebokoff's 1400-block Liard Drive apartment where he had been living at the time. Within the kitchen and dining room areas, Zaparozan showed 15 spots where Montgomery's blood was found, including on the dining room ceiling.

An imprint of Legebokoff's bare foot was found in a pool of Montgomery's blood on the dining room's linoleum floor and a spatter forming "100 plus" stains on the dining room wall and baseboard, also from Montgomery, were found.

Zaporozan said the pattern indicated the source of the blood was "right low to the floor."

More blood from Montgomery was found on the living room curtain, as well as in the hallway and master bedroom and on a fitted sheet and a hoodie and the bottom of a bath mat found in the apartment.

Other than to identify the stains as "transfer," meaning they came as a result of a source touching something, or "spatter," meaning they flew through the air before landing on a surface, Zaporozan was reluctant to draw many conclusions from what she found.

However, she did offer one conclusion that was aided by feeding the coordinates of 13 spots into a computer program.

"The impact pattern observed on the front of the kitchen cabinet doors, the baseboards adjacent to the dining room, the south and west wall, the dining room floor, the ceiling, the dining room table and laundry closet were consistent with Natasha Montgomery receiving at minimum one impact from an exposed blunt source while positioned in the southeast quadrant of the dining room to a maximum height of 59 centimetres off the floor," Zaporozan said.

An axe with Montgomery's blood on it was found in the apartment's linen closet, the court heard in earlier testimony.

The large blood stain found on the couch in the apartment was also noted with Zaporozan saying Jill Stuchenko was the source. Her body was found in a gravel pit off Foothills Boulevard on Oct. 20, 2009 while Legebokoff was living in a basement suite in the 1500-block of Carney Street.

Zaporozan said the stain was large enough to form a saturation stain that leaked through and form an icicle-like formation on the bottom of the couch.

"The blood was drying as it was dripping off the couch," Zaporozan.

Zaporozan said she was unable to calculate how much blood was found there.

Zaporozan later said a blood from a stain that saturated into the basement carpet of the Carney Street home matched Stuchenko's.

Earlier Wednesday, the court saw the remainder of a video recorded interview Legebokoff had with police shortly after his arrest for the murder of Leslie.

Legebokoff's girlfriend, Amy Voell, was also present and with one of the RCMP officers looking on, she broke up wth him.

"I can't trust you anymore," Voell said.

Legebokoff continued to repeat he did not kill Leslie.

The trial continues today at the Prince George courthouse 9:30 a.m. start.