The crowd shouted “hang him” as Allan Joseph Legere was led into a New Brunswick courtroom to answer for what would be his first murder.
Little did they know on that unsettled, cool day in July 1986 that the Chatham man who would come to be known as the Monster of the Miramichi was just getting started.
Then 38, Legere was charged, along with two men from Newcastle, N.B., with second-degree murder in the beating death of John Glendenning, a 66-year-old shopkeeper, during a robbery at his Black River home the month previous. He died from strangulation, with a shirt tied around his neck.
The robbers tied, beat and sexually assaulted his 62-year-old wife as they hunted for a safe said to contain a substantial amount of money, but she eventually got free and called police. The doctor who first saw her later told the court he “couldn’t believe that a person could be that badly beaten and still be alive.”
The robbers had tied John Glendenning’s hands and feet. He was beaten so thoroughly that photos of his body showed hardly a spot that was not bruised. Some of his injuries may have been caused by blows from a piece of wood. But mostly the men just used their fists and their boots.
Two of them pleaded guilty minutes before his widow took the stand.
Legere put up a fight, but a jury convicted him in January 1987. He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 18 years.
Then on May 3, 1989, Legere escaped while guards from the Atlantic Institution, a maximum-security prison in Renous, N.B., escorted him to Georges Dumont Hospital in Moncton.
They’d taken him to a washroom, where Legere “faked needing toilet paper and escaped out of the hospital,” according to a chronology of events from the University of New Brunswick. “He had hidden a collapsed TV antenna in his rectum and a piece of metal in a cigar to open both his cuffs and leg shackles. His body belt remained buckled.”
The Correctional Service of Canada would later blame sloppy security for Legere’s well-planned escape.
In the hospital parking lot, Legere pushed a woman inside her car and took off with her as a hostage inside the vehicle.
She escaped unharmed, but many others would not be so lucky.
Legere went on to terrorize the Miramichi area for seven months.
Soon after his hospital escape, Legere beat up, bound and robbed a man whose wallet and 1986 Chrysler New Yorker were later found in Newcastle.
His crime spree continued when Legere stole the jewelry of a woman who told police she’d spotted someone in her window. People were reporting sightings of Legere to police when someone broke into another Chatham home, stealing a duffle bag, pie and $100 worth of meat from a freezer.
Then on May 28, 1989, Legere beat Chatham storeowner Annie Flam to death. “Her body was found in the smouldering remains of her home,” according to UNB’s chronology. “Her sister-in-law, Nina, was rescued. She was found raped and beaten, sitting at the bottom of the stairs.”
Nina Flam later testified that she was woken up after 11 p.m. by a masked man. “The intruder knew who she was and called her by her name, asking questions about her family,” according to court records. “Her hands were bound with nylons.”
Legere “threatened her with a knife and tried to strangle her. At one point, he asked her if she knew where Annie Flam kept her money.”
After sexually assaulting her, Legere “‘tucked’ her into bed and set fire to clothing and material he obtained from a closet in the room,” according to court records. “Then he left, closing the door behind him. She managed to get out of bed and go to the door. When she opened it, she found the intruder waiting at the door. She was pushed back into the room and the door was again closed on her.”
Nina Flam eventually escaped and made it downstairs on her own, but passed out. She was rescued by a police officer who was investigating reports of smoke.
According to court records, Legere “had also set fire to Annie Flam’s apartment and it had burned for an hour or more. When the police and firemen entered Annie Flam’s apartment, they found her dead body ‘tucked’ into bed. They had difficulty removing her from the bedding.”
Investigators later found glasses near the scene like the ones Legere was wearing when he escaped in Moncton. Crime Stoppers offered a $2,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
“Police had approximately 50 reports (indicating Legere was in) both Fredericton and Toronto but the police believed he was still in the Miramichi area,” said the UNB chronology.
They were right.
On Oct. 14, 1989, two Newcastle sisters, Donna Alberta Daughney, 45, and Linda Lou Daughney, 41, were found sexually assaulted and beaten to death in their fire-damaged home.
“Donna Daughney’s body was found ‘tucked’ in her bed,” said court records. “Linda Daughney’s body was found on the floor in Donna’s bedroom. An autopsy showed that Donna Daughney died of the beating she sustained, as well as from aspirating her own vomit. There was evidence that the murderer spent several hours torturing these two women.”
A headline in New Brunswick’s Telegraph-Journal screamed: “Police say Legere is a prime suspect in their murders.”
Just over a month later, on Nov. 16, 1989, Roman Catholic priest James Smith, 69, was found beaten to death in the rectory of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Chatham Head.
“During the day (in Father Smith’s house) the killer ate, washed his boots, put plastic bread bags on his feet to keep them dry, changed clothes putting the bloody ones in another bag, and didn’t notice one bloody footprint on a church magazine,” according to the UNB chronology.
“He answered the phone saying ‘wrong number,’ and later that day hotwired the priest’s car, a 1984 Oldsmobile Delta 88.”
When the priest didn’t show up for evening mass, parishioners went to the rectory to check on him. “The evidence indicated that Smith had been kicked, pounded and hit for several hours before he finally died,” said court records. “Blood was found in many rooms of the house, but the main attacks on Smith had taken place in the kitchen and office. There was blood over much of these two rooms. Foot imprints in the blood were found on two church publications which were lying on the kitchen floor. Other footprints were found in the blood in both the office and kitchen.”
The bloody footprints were later identified as coming from Legere’s boots.
He was recaptured on Nov. 24, 1989, after commandeering three vehicles at gunpoint, according to The Associated Press.
The killer’s arrest came after he forced a taxi he’d hailed in Saint John to head for Moncton. When it went off the road, a vacationing police officer who stopped to offer help was taken hostage. But the officer fled at a gas station.
Legere was caught near the community of Nelson-Miramichi after commandeering a truck.
He was eventually convicted of four more murders.
“The evidence is that Legere was kicked in the face as he was resisting arrest. Some time later, he blew his nose with a tissue paper, which he threw into a garbage can,” according to court records. “The tissue contained drops of blood from the injury to his nose caused by the kick. This tissue was recovered by the RCMP and sent to the crime lab for DNA testing.”
An analysis of that blood and hair samples taken from Legere later showed that a vaginal swab taken from Nina Flam on the night she was raped matched Legere’s DNA. Court records indicated the estimated frequency of such a match would be less than 1 in 5.2 million male Caucasians.
After the manhunt for Legere came to a close, Maclean’s reported that “drivers passing the RCMP station in Newcastle, N.B., honked their horns in joy. People on the street embraced.”
In the hospital in nearby Chatham, “the announcement on the public-address system led to a spontaneous coffee-and-doughnuts party in the cafeteria,” the magazine reported.
“The reason for the elation that swept across New Brunswick’s Miramichi area” was clear, according to Maclean’s: “after a manhunt that had lasted more than six months, police had finally captured escaped killer Allan Legere, 41, the prime suspect in a string of brutal murders in the region.”
Legere died Monday at the age of 78 while serving a life sentence at the Edmonton Institution in Alberta.
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