Canada’s Youngest Serial Killer - Serial Killer Documentary
Canada’s Youngest Serial Killer - Serial Killer Documentary
Speaker 1: As a hiding place. This highway is ideal.
Speaker 2: A body might not be found ever or maybe never.
Speaker 3: For years, Lauren was kind of a free spirit, and
we didn't worry about her when probably we should have
worried about her more.
Speaker 4: From the very beginning, Cody starts saying things about sex
to Lauren, very very graphic things about sex. It's so
frightening to hear the story.
Speaker 5: It appears that Cody was a proverbial taking time bomb,
just waiting to go off.
Speaker 3: There wasn't poaching, it was.
Speaker 1: It was murder.
Speaker 3: You can't learn that. You have to be born that way.
You can't learn that evil.
Speaker 6: But if one is already killed, then how many other
victims may still.
Speaker 1: Be out there.
Speaker 4: British Columbia is really a fascinating place and it's incredibly isolated.
Speaker 7: We're in the middle of a sea of trees.
Speaker 8: British Columbia is about one point seven times the size
of France.
Speaker 4: You know how these little communities that for years didn't
have running water or update electricity.
Speaker 2: I go back a long way and there were just
small little villages even till I was fourteen week toraveledj
toown once a week by horse, and buggy or horse
and slay. Never heard of anyone go missing like this.
Speaker 9: Cutting through these rural communities is a highway that the
last few decades has become increasingly.
Speaker 1: Notorious, Highway sixteen.
Speaker 6: Between Prince George and Prince Rupery. It is seven hundred
and twenty five kilometers long.
Speaker 4: Highway sixteen in British Columbia has a much more well
known name. It's often referred to as the Highway of Tears.
Speaker 5: It relates back to the incredible amount of murdered and
missing women and girls that have simply just disappeared on
that highway. When these cases happen, it takes a very
It hits close to home.
Speaker 8: Usually they're a hitch hiking and doing so at a desperation.
Speaker 7: They really have no other form of transportation.
Speaker 8: Can you imagine as seven and twenty kilometers stretch, there's
maybe a town every hour.
Speaker 1: As a hiding place. This highway is ideal.
Speaker 2: A body might not be found ever, or maybe never
for years.
Speaker 9: Fort Saint James, a small village just off the Highway
of Tears, is home to Cody Lechebakhov. He's born in
nineteen ninety and grows up close to this infamous stretch
of road.
Speaker 5: By all appearances, Cody came from a great family, didn't
want for much growing up, had everything, all the comforts
of home, essentially his full life ahead of them.
Speaker 2: I didn't know him personally. I didn't know his father
or mother personally, but his grandparents I knew extremely well.
I can't say anything bad about.
Speaker 1: My dog.
Speaker 4: Legendbikoff was in some respects a normal kid. He was
a big kid, an early bloomer in some ways. But
one of the things that kind of stood out about
him is he loved to play hockey. But he stood
out in terms of his level of violence on the
hockey rink.
Speaker 6: Other parents would take their children off the ice when
he was participating in hockey because of his aggressive nature.
We all can come out out and be very, very
aggressive at certain times.
Speaker 1: The difference is are we able to.
Speaker 6: Control our anger and not have it come out that
serious violent acts occur to other people. Here you have
someone who's a deer hunter, and he is hunting the deer,
but maims them first and then goes with his hands
to finish the deal of killing them.
Speaker 4: This is somebody who would literally beat a deer to death.
Speaker 5: The fact that he's a hunter doesn't surprise me, but
the fact that he took pleasure in seeing those animals suffer,
that's staggering.
Speaker 4: Actually, it is a marker. It is a risk factor
for violence against humans, and yet in some respects it
was compartmentalized because he was very well liked and got
along and had plenty of friends.
Speaker 2: I think the hardest part of all is anyone that
knew him never suspected for a minute that any of
this would have ever gone on.
Speaker 9: After graduating high school, Legebokhov moves one hundred miles from
rural Fort Saint James to the city of Prince George.
Speaker 1: My name is Todd Doherty.
Speaker 5: I'm the Member of Parliament for Carebrew Prince George. We
have a tremendous amount of First Nations communities in and
around our area, and gradually, over time, as our forestry
industry has been decimated, we've seen a lot of economic hardship.
You've got families that are finding it harder to make
ends meet. You have substance abuse issues, you have domestic
abuse issues.
Speaker 9: Cody gets a job as a mechanic, starts a relationship
and appears to quickly adapt to city life.
Speaker 8: If you want to find trouble, that's not difficult to
find a Prince George.
Speaker 7: It could be a bit of a party town.
Speaker 8: There are certainly escort services in the city. It's not
difficult to find drugs in this town.
Speaker 6: So imagine moving to this urban environment, this environment with
all of these different stimulus, all these different ideas, all
these different things coming at you from you coming from
a small rural environment.
Speaker 1: That's a lot.
Speaker 6: We can now see the potential as he's in this
urban area for him to escalate.
Speaker 8: Cody Eligibokov seemed to like the party a lot. He
was fairly popular with the girls. He really got into
the cocaine.
Speaker 4: I think Legibikoff he almost lived a double life. I
think you have somebody who is working at a Ford dealership,
who's got a relationship, who people see as very personable,
is likable, is funny, and then you have this other side.
It's like the dark depths of the soul that you
start seeing.
Speaker 6: Here you have an individual who is now working, but
the cocaine addiction is there girlfriend in the middle. The
idea to juggle all of those this is more stress
on an individual. This anger this, this aggression is already there.
You have elements starting to line up now that can
lead someone to be involved in very violent activities.
Speaker 3: My name is Doug Leslie and I am Lauren don
Leslie's father. From what I can understand, she did meet
him online and he went and.
Speaker 7: Picked her up.
Speaker 4: It's so frightening to hear the story.
Speaker 5: It appears that you know Cody was a taking time bomb,
just waiting to go off.
Speaker 9: Cody lejobock Off, now aged twenty, has a girlfriend and
is working as a mechanic. He's also hiding a cocaine addiction,
and it started chatting with the fifteen year old girl online,
Lauren Leslie.
Speaker 2: Lauren was special from day one. As she grew, she
spent a lot of time at my house visiting. She
was a unique girl, very unique girl.
Speaker 4: She was always awesome, very thoughtful.
Speaker 3: She had a vision problem. She was legally blind, but
you'd really never know it by watching her because she
never let on. It never really slowed her down at all.
Speaker 2: When she was four, she went to school with a
little boy and liked this little boy. But when this
boy was nine, he drowned in the lake. When it
came to the the funerals. She wanted to sit with
the parents, and she sat beside the mother in a
stroke her arm. And this is how Nique. She's nine
years old. This is the unique little girl.
Speaker 4: Lauren Leslie is a very innocent fifteen year old girl.
She meets this predator on a Canadian internet site called Nexopia.
From the very beginning, it is clear that the agendas
are very, very different. From the very beginning, Cody starts
saying things about sex to Lauren, very very graphic things
about sex. You can see that this makes Lauren very
very uncomfortable. And the way she handles that in their
communication online is she tries to ignore it, and then
she tries to kind of say to him, Hey, that's
not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something different.
And you know, it's just a dramatic to see the
differences in what these two people are saying.
Speaker 3: Well, the last time I saw her was about three
o'clock in the afternoon and she was hanging around with
friends and walking downtown.
Speaker 4: On the night of November twenty seventh, she tells her
mom she's going to have coffee with a friend, and
she goes and she meets this person. This predator at
a school on the playground. He offers to get her
some alcohol, which you know she's much too young to
be drinking, but she finally says, okay, I'll have some
mud sliders. What is about to happen, I think is
something that's very, very scary.
Speaker 5: There were two RCP officers, one from the Prince Hur's detachment,
one from the boundary of Detachment that we're meeting on
Highway sixteen.
Speaker 1: Late at night.
Speaker 5: It is amongst one of the darkest highways I've ever
been on. Just ahead of them, this truck pulls out
of a isolated logging road and at a high rate
of speed, kind of fish tailing down the road.
Speaker 4: To his credit, this cops spidy senses just start going off,
puts his lights on, calls her back up, and pulls
over this black truck.
Speaker 6: Think about the remoteness of the Highway of tears, but
can you imagine making a traffic stop in a remote
area like this.
Speaker 4: The police officer comes up to the window, he's shining
his light. He looks at his credentials and he notices
that there's this kind of red smudge on this person,
the driver's chin, and it looks like his blood. Meanwhile,
his backup person comes. They start looking around and they
find blood. There's a knife in the car that's got
blood on it. There's a wrench in the car that's
got blood on it. They plum blood just about everywhere.
Speaker 6: The first response from him is, well, I've been hunting,
been poaching.
Speaker 1: Deer, and that's what happened.
Speaker 6: Okay, blood on a wrench, The officer continues on.
Speaker 4: Even though the police don't at all believe Cody's story,
they're going to check it out. They go back to
this logging road and they discover the worst case scenario.
They discover the body of a young girl who's in
the snow. She has been beaten so badly that her
face is unrecognizable. They have some clue though, in terms
of who she is, because they also had found this
really adorable monkey backpack. They find a wallet, a Polka
dot wallet, and in that has got Lauren Leslie's identification card,
her medical card.
Speaker 3: I got a car all from the cops that I
don't know. It was probably midnight, dish. I went up
to the to the site and that when I got there,
the cops are at the end of the road.
Speaker 2: My son Doug called me by phone quite early in
the morning to tell me what had happened. At the end.
It was devastating to hear that news.
Speaker 5: Lauren was so young, Absolutely devastated that family, Absolutely devastated
that family in so many ways. I couldn't imagine what
Lauren's last moments were.
Speaker 8: Late. I remember vividly that the photo that they issued
of Cody Legibokoff, he looked like an absolute trade wreck.
You could tell he did a lot of drugs.
Speaker 3: I ended up in the police station in Vanaru for
about thirty feet from Ledgerbokoff. He was in the cell
in the next couple of rooms over, and you know,
I told the cop to let me in for five minutes,
and I found out later on and that's all he
could do is to not let me in. But it was,
you know, to have that thirty feet away from me
at that time was pretty rough.
Speaker 4: This is somebody who was not out of control of
his life. This was somebody who had a girlfriend. This
was somebody who was holding down a job. So this
is not somebody whose life is going off the rails
because of their cocaine use. When you look at the
premeditated and calculating way that this offender, that this predator
goes online, needs somebody, and that's not the kind of
murder that you see with somebody who's psychotic because of
some dragon fueled frenzy.
Speaker 9: Ledgebokoff is held in custody, his apartment is searched and
he swabbed for DNA as police began preparing evidence for
his trial twelve months after Lauren's death. After examining new evidence,
police contact Laurence family was shocking news.
Speaker 3: About a year later, we got called in when they
connected the dots and found out that he was in
fact being charged with three more murders.
Speaker 5: It's unbelievable he stumbled upon what turned out to be
Canada's youngest serial killer. You never know what's going on
in the house beside you. With this case, that's probably
one of the most terrifying things.
Speaker 9: Cody Leedjebakhov is in custody charged with the first green
murder of fifteen year old Lauren Leslie. Police now suspects
Lauren isn't his first victim. They've been investigating the murders
and missing persons cases of three other women.
Speaker 5: This happened over a course of a long period of time.
When you have one body turn up and then maybe
you have another body and completely unrelated, you don't believe
that you have a serial killer of walking amongst us.
And it was only after the discovery of Lauren that
investigators were they able to really piece together that, holy smokes,
we have a serial killer amongst us.
Speaker 9: The unsolved murders and missing person cases back to over
a year before Lauren Leslie was killed. On October ninth,
two thousand and nine, local woman Jills Touchinko is reported missing.
Speaker 8: Jill Stutchenko a thirty five year old mother of five
who was very much deep into your addictions.
Speaker 7: She was kind of known, and I actually kind of
known and liked.
Speaker 8: She had friends who wanted to get the word out
about her disappearance, and of course turned to us to
get that word out.
Speaker 4: This is a woman who had had some struggles in
her life. She had a pretty significant cocaine addiction that
she was battling, but she was also the mother of
five children and she really really wanted to get her
life straightened out so she could take care of her children,
and she was just having a difficult time with it.
Speaker 6: Stitchenko was found half buried in a gravel pit just
outside Prince George.
Speaker 4: She had been completely mutilated. There was evidence that she
had been beaten with a blunt object, she had been stabbed,
There was evidence that she had been sexually assaulted. It
was just an absolutely horrendous crime scene.
Speaker 8: Whenever they find a body, they do a lot of forensics.
They just gather as much evidence as they can. They'll
close the scene down for a day or so.
Speaker 9: By comparing DNA records from Jill Stucchinko to a stain
found on Legibakhov's sofa, police now believe he is Jill's killer.
Speaker 4: This is Cody Lejebikov's first murder, at least first confirmed murder.
Cody would often contact women who were sex workers. He
also would get them to get crack cocaine for him.
He seemed to have a pretty significant addiction around this
time to crack cocaine, and so those both may have
been in play in terms of when she came over
to his apartment. We know that she died an absolutely horrendous,
horrendous death based on autopsy results.
Speaker 5: The first murder was probably very opportunistic and he found
that will wait a second, I got away with this.
It was easy to do and he had it in him,
and that just fueled the passion to do more.
Speaker 9: Another vulnerable woman is reported missing from Prince George.
Speaker 8: Natasha Montgomery was a girlfriend Quinnell, which is a small
community probably about an hour hour and a half drive
south of Prince George.
Speaker 7: Came from a good.
Speaker 8: Family, did a lot of figure skating as a youngster,
and sort of lost her way when she came up
to Prince George.
Speaker 4: Natasha Montgomery was twenty three years old. She had struggled
with crack cocaine that was kind of a monkey on
her back that she had a really hard and time
getting rid of. She sometimes resorted to sex work as
a way to supplement her income. So she was really
somebody who was in a high risk category.
Speaker 8: She was missing, and we you know, quite honestly, every
couple of weeks somebody goes missing, and more often than
not they sort of resurface.
Speaker 7: But she hadn't resurfaced.
Speaker 9: Natasha Montgomery is still missing and presumed dead. When Legen
balk Off is charged with Lauren's murder, police find Natasha's
DNA on Ledgenbakoff's clothing and in various places in his apartment.
Speaker 8: They blue lighted it and there was swabs everywhere, and
it was it looked like he basically started chasing her
from his bedroom into the kitchen.
Speaker 7: And beat her to death.
Speaker 6: Now we have another victim that's linked to him because
of DNA evidence found in his apartment. If we have
Montgomery's body that has never been found, we just never
know how many others are out there, whether it be
on the Highway of Tears or some other place that
if one is already killed, then how many other victims
may still be out there.
Speaker 4: There is eleven months between Cody's first murder and a
second one. Is it possible that he did other murmurders
during this time? It is. There certainly have been serial
killers who have started out slowly and then ramped up.
They did one one year, one the next year, one
six months later, and ramped up. So it's possible that
he waited for a year. But it's also possible that
there are other victims that we don't know about.
Speaker 2: It would be horrifying for parents do not be able
to find your children, regardless of what has happened to them,
you know, to not know anything. It would be very,
very difficult.
Speaker 8: The best way to describe hers is through her sister.
The way she described Cynthia was a very trusting, you know,
a bit of a happy It sounds like, you know,
she was quite the pleasant person.
Speaker 4: Cynthia seemed to struggle at times with cocaine addiction and
also would engage in sex work is a way to
supplement her income. On September the tenth, two thousand, Cynthia
Moss was murdered, leaving behind one child to now be
without a mom.
Speaker 6: Moss is found in a wooded park in Prince George.
Speaker 9: One of Legebokov's socks is found to contain DNA matching Cynthia's.
Her DNA is also found on an axe in Ledgebahkov's bedroom.
Speaker 6: What we see with the brutal murder of miss Moss
is just pure aggression and violence coming out. We have
seen his violence with animals and the way that he
hunts and the way he kills with his hands. We
hope that we don't see that move to a human being,
but we do with the victim of Moss.
Speaker 4: These three victims are clearly targeted. I believe they're vulnerable
and they're individuals that Cody knows he can can take
advantage of.
Speaker 6: Most of his victims are mothers who now leave behind
children who will never see the smile the affection of
their mother again.
Speaker 9: Ledgibokhov arranged to meet Lauren Leslie less than three months
after murdering Cynthia Moss. Lauren had no way of knowing
that the guys she met online was already a serial killer,
because until he met Lauren, he'd gotten away with it.
Speaker 8: I'm certain that Cody Legebokov was really counting on nobody
finding Laura Lesley's body. The way he was trying to
get away from the scene, it sounded like he had
a probably a lot of guilt on his mind, a
lot of fear.
Speaker 5: It's challenging for those that go missing that maybe on
the street and maybe do not have ragilar content act
with loved ones. It also speaks to how uh incredibly
fortunate that that rhamp officer on the on the on
the road was, because if they hadn't caught him that night,
they likely wouldn't have caught him for a while.
Speaker 8: The way the bodies were positioned and the injuries that
they suffered, and what he did to them afterwards, you know,
it was all It was definitely the size of the pattern.
Speaker 6: If he was not stopped, would we have the ability
to catch this individual because he is moving on from
people being involved women being involved in the sex trade
to people who are not involved in the sex trade.
Speaker 1: We often like to put our serial killers in.
Speaker 6: A box where we can find that these similar characteristics
are telling us of giving us some sort of profile
or indication of where he she may go next. This
switch up is a difficult one to take, and thank
goodness he was taken into custody.
Speaker 3: It's bittersweet because I mean, it's terrible to have a
child gone, but that she was a catalyst to stop him,
that was the good part.
Speaker 4: One of the really impressive things about the story is
that Lauren Leslie's family has said a couple of times
that the one thing they've held on to is the
fact that their daughter's murder prevented additional murders, and that
that has been somewhat comforting to them. And I am
sure that if they had not caught him at this point,
he would have continued to murder until he was caught.
Speaker 3: During court, we were pretty much all together, so many
people were impacted by it.
Speaker 8: He was living with three girls, and one of the
girls testified that she saw him his nose was bleeding
into a toilet and she said, Cody, you know, just
kind of warned him, like, you're.
Speaker 7: Doing way too much cocaine. He was a bit of
a puzzle.
Speaker 8: I remember during that during the trial, there was a
you know, a sex worker who supplied drugs to them,
and she said, yeah, I owe you three hundred bucks
and he said, oh, don't worry about it, you know,
I'll catch you on the rebound. I just don't quite understand.
I think it was a little bit of probably a
bit impulsive.
Speaker 9: Friends of Jill'stachinko, Natasha Montgomery, and Cynthia Moss also testify
in court.
Speaker 8: They really wanted to get their stories out and really.
Speaker 7: They were scared.
Speaker 8: They were really worried that they could be the next victim,
and I think they really wanted to put them away.
Speaker 7: Pretty much.
Speaker 8: The first thing that the Crown prosecutor says was, we
have three thousand pages of forensic evidence. You know, they
weren't going to miss a beat on this. One basically said, well, uh,
these three women were in trouble with the local drug
dealers and uh, you know they wanted to get them
because they owed them money.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 8: And a mister X and a mister Y and a
mister Z. Uh said, Cody, you got to help us out.
He said that he was. He was the one who
handed them in the weapons. And they these characters actually
did did these three n and uh disposed of the bodies.
It was it was, you know, so outrageous and so ridiculous.
Speaker 9: Ledja Bokoff has another explanation for Lauren's death.
Speaker 6: He claims that her death is because she brought a
knife with her and self inflicted this harm on herself.
Speaker 8: She you know, somehow escaped from the track and she
was doing this to her stall, and he decided, well, okay,
she's done for I'm going to just put her out
of her messy with us ranch.
Speaker 4: He truly seems to have a lack of understanding about
normal emotions, and he also seems to have a limited
ability to feel them. You know, when you hear him
talk about the murders, there's just no sense of emotion, remorse, regret, guilt,
or any of the things that we would hope to see.
Speaker 8: He was going to roll the dice and see if
he could fool everybody.
Speaker 9: The jury are considering their verdict at Legebokov's murder trial.
His defense claimed Lauren Leslie tried to take her own
life and that three unnamed individuals are responsible for the
murders of Jill Stachinko, Natasha Montgomery, and Cynthia Moss.
Speaker 6: Ledger Balkoff is convicted in September of twenty fourteen of
four counts of murder.
Speaker 4: I think what's interesting is how rare it is for
a serial killer to start in their teens, and I
think that speaks to the level of depravity to some extent.
And Cody about fourteen percent of serial killers start in
their teens.
Speaker 6: Remember, the brain does not fully form until about age
twenty five, so he has the impulsivity of a teenager
with the anger that's developed that usually doesn't make its
way to criminal activity of this nature until one is
in their late twenties or thirties. That shows itself in
the aggressive nature of how these people were killed.
Speaker 4: I think that we often do tend to look primarily
at circumstances, trauma and those kinds of things, and I
think it's easy to forget that there are people who
seem to, for whatever reason biologically to seem to have
something missing. And I do think that Cody is an
example of that.
Speaker 5: I would say he's a predator. He prayed on the week,
he prayed on the most vulnerable, and he took full
advantages of their disadvantages.
Speaker 1: As his methods.
Speaker 5: And modus operandi kind of evolved with their others.
Speaker 8: What they do is they give prisoners a bit of
a faint hope as a way to make them behave
themselves and kind of do the right things and you know,
not being corrigible and not make it difficult or on
the staff. It gives him that a bit of incentive
and keeps amount of trouble.
Speaker 6: It seems he's following the rules, and therefore he is
rewarded with being in a less secure prison. What that
means more privileges, a better environment. Years is a long time.
Some people become institutionalized and follow the rules and make
their way toward rehabilitation. Others take the time to simply say,
let me go along with this, let me play the
game if you will, and do my time and then
go back to whatever.
Speaker 3: I just want him to stay in jail for the
rest of his life. I'm working with MPs to try
to get him back in maximum security where he belongs.
Speaker 7: I think a lot of.
Speaker 8: People are very angry that this has happened, just on principle,
the whole turmoil that he caused these people.
Speaker 5: I've raised this in Parliament a number of times as
Cody has gone through the system. You know, how can
correct this? Canada transfer this horrific killer, Canada's youngest serial killer.
He's shown no signs of remorse, still holds the information
to whereabout so one of his victims.
Speaker 1: You know, when you speak with the.
Speaker 5: Victims' families, it's absolutely heartbreaking and overwhelmingly the question is
who fights for us?
Speaker 4: Where's our voice?
Speaker 1: You know, it's just.
Speaker 5: You can't help but get emotional and get drawn into it.
Speaker 4: We've never seen any remorse from this person. This is
somebody who to this day is saying he didn't do it.
He's blaming it on three other people. There's no evidence
that even exist, and so when you look at risk
factors for recidivism, they're all over the place. I think
he has the capacity to kill again.
Speaker 3: How many more are there actually out there that he
has murdered? I don't think it's done. You can't learn that.
You have to be born that way because you can't
learn that evil.
Speaker 4: I think the word psychopath gets used and overused all
the time. I have not personally evaluated him, but I
will tell you there is something about him I think
that is very scary.
Speaker 5: We have so many people that seemingly just disappear in
our neck of the woods, and there's lots of different
theres as to what's happening with that. Did he use
that as a cover, did that motivate him, did that
fuel him to try it himself? That's something to ask
Cody Lejah Balkoff, And I don't think he'll ever tell that.
Speaker 3: Lauren was kind of a free spirit and we didn't
worry about her when probably we should have worried about
her more. And you know, you take it for granted
that people are what you see, but they're not really.
We got to pay more attention to our kids, for sure.
Speaker 2: Definitely has affected everyone around people that I never knew
before that I've come in contact know about Lauren.
Speaker 4: Certainly, it's made an impact.
Speaker 2: What would she be doing today if she was still here,
she would still be going around helping people. That's what
she would be doing in some way or another. I
try not to think about that. It's too much to
think about it.
Speaker 1: To do what you want me