In the aftermath of the conviction and sentencing of serial killer Cody Legebokoff, a series of photographic, audio and video evidence shown to the jury and the courts were made public and appeared in an article by the Prince George Citizen on their website.
The evidence included photographs of crime scenes and Legebokoff’s home and personal affects, audio and video recordings of his arrest and subsequent interviews and interrogations by police personnel.
Regardless of the ethical issues of releasing these types of recordings to the public, what the photos and recordings did was provide a rare opportunity to examine Legebokoff in more depth than the average citizen will ever get to, or want to.
Upon watching some four hours of the over 12 hours of footage made available one thing stood out to me above all else. Legebokoff seems throughout all of the recordings, at least externally, normal.
Even moments after his arrest and committing the murder of Loren Leslie, Legebokoff seems completely at peace and utterly average.
Perhaps that is what is most frightening about the tapes; how incredibly innocuous he appears on the outside.
It is that that is terrifying, that Legebokoff could be anybody: the boy next door, the hunter down the street; that he appears for all intents and purposes sensible, good-natured and remarkably average.
And yet, as we all sadly have found out, he is anything but.
The tapes offer brief glimpses of what is underneath the facade of a “good ol’ northern boy.” A moment of cavalier here, a tone of voice there all in regards to the brutal murders of four women.
These tapes are so terrifying because they illustrate just how normal a predator can appear to those around them. They could be walking amongst us and we would never know and that is truly chilling.
The question lies in how to identify and prevent these types of predators from doing what it is that they do and that question seems to me to be harder than ever to answer after viewing these tapes. We like to imagine that all those that would do us and our children harm are identifiable, but the sad truth is that many of them appear exactly like Legebokoff did: normal.