Another British Columbia serial killer: crack user, 23, murdered four females

A man, aged 23, was convicted of killing three women and a teenaged girl in northern British Columbia, making him one of Canada's youngest serial killers.

Cody Legebokoff was convicted of killing Jill Stuchenko, 35, Cynthia Maas, 35, Natasha Montgomery, 23, and Loren Leslie, 15, after a trial that heard gruesome details about the circumstances of the victims' deaths and testimony from the accused.

Legebokoff was just 19 years old when he killed his first victim in Prince George. British Columbia has a dark history of serial killers, including Clifford Olson and Robert Pickton. Olson was convicted of the sex slayings of 11 children in the Vancouver area in the early 1980s. Pickton was charged with the murders of 26 women, and confessed to having killed 49.

Legebokoff's victims fit a familiar profile of vulnerability in the form of poverty and addiction; three were drug users who had turned to sex work in Prince George, according to testimony. Leslie, who had a rare eye condition that impaired her vision, struggled with mental illness.

But beyond that, the trial did not reveal what motivated Legebokoff, who had an apparently typical upbringing in Fort St. James, British Columbia, but had become a frequent user of crack cocaine by the time of the murders. He admitted he was present when each victim died but denied killing any of them. DNA evidence tied him to the first three.

Stuchenko's badly beaten body was found half buried in a gravel pit in the outskirts of Prince George in November 2009, six weeks after she was last seen. Montgomery was last seen leaving a friend's house in the late summer of 2010. Her body was never found. Maas vanished days later. Her body was subsequently found in a wooded park.