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He was caught only because an alert young RCMP constable, Aaron Kehler, stopped Legebokoff’s truck when he spotted it roaring onto a highway in remote northern British Columbia.

During the stop, he noticed blood on Legebokoff’s shorts and legs, blood that the young man claimed was from a deer he’d poached.

But Kehler, suspicious, dispatched a conservation officer to search the bush and there, he found not a dead deer but the battered body of the 15-year-old.

DNA later linked Legebokoff to the earlier murders of three other women in the logging city of Prince George — Jill Stacey Stuchenko and Cynthia Frances Maas, both 35, and Natasha Lynn Montgomery, 23.

All were vulnerable women, drug users who sometimes did sex work, but they were also full human beings, mothers and daughters and siblings.

Most cruelly, Montgomery’s body has never been recovered, a source of infinite torture for her mom and dad.

All of this meant that by the time he was 20, Legebokoff already had killed four times.

As Brendan Fitzpatrick, who was the superintendent in charge of operations for the RCMP’s E Division major crime at the time, says, “I had 22-odd years in major crime.

“What he did to those women, and especially Loren Leslie, well, if he hadn’t been caught that night, we would have been picking up bodies for a long time.”

Fitzpatrick left the force in 2017, but says from the moment DNA linked Legebokoff to the earlier murders until he retired, there were persistent, ongoing efforts to convince him to give up the location of Montgomery’s remains.