The Highway of Tears

In 2009 and 2010, three women from Prince George, British Columbia, were killed: Jill Stuchenko, 35, in October 2009, then Natasha Montgomery, 23, and Cynthia Maas, 35, in the late summer of 2010. Natasha’s body was never found. No one had been charged when, late on November 27, 2010, an RCMP officer on Highway 27 near Vanderhoof watched a pickup pull out of a remote logging road and stopped it on a hunch.

The driver was 20-year-old Cody Legebokoff. He had blood on his face and legs, and a girl’s backpack was in the truck. Conservation officer Cameron Hill followed the tire tracks and footprints to an old gravel pit, where he found 15-year-old Loren Leslie, who had been beaten to death. They had met on Nexopia, a social networking site. Blood tied him to the others: Natasha’s DNA was all over his basement suite and on an ax, Jill’s was in his couch and Cynthia’s was on a pickaxe.

Legebokoff pleaded not guilty and testified that he had a part in three of the deaths but was not the killer. In September 2014 a jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder, and he received life with no parole for 25 years. The B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the convictions in September 2016, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear his case in February 2017.