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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Episode 120. And I am your Norwegian host. As some of my dedicated fans that follow the show on Facebook know, I got married this last weekend. I am very happy to finally being able to call my dear Thea my wife.
I changed my name so that we both can have the same last names. My full name is now Thomas Roseland Viborg Thun. In Norwegian parlance, that is pronounced Thomas Roseland Viborg Thun. I sincerely hope you are doing well, my very dear listeners.
Here in Norway, things are seemingly looking better every day, with extremely few people still in hospital, and our society is slowly getting back to normal operations. I know the United States is in dire straits at the moment, but it is my belief that things will soon take a turn for the better there as well.
In any case, please use this episode as a welcome distraction from all the terrible news being served by the mainstream press 24 hours a day. I promise. No politics or punditry here on TSK. Tonight's topic takes us a bit north of the USA. We've been here before, you and I, dear listener. The land is that of maple syrup.
vast wilderness, and quite a few notorious serial killers as well. I am, of course, talking about Canada. We travel again back in time, this time to the tail end of the golden age of serial murder, the 1980s. Our subject of tonight's expose has a nickname, the Monster of the Miramichi.
He murdered at least five human beings, and his name is Alan Joseph Legere. This part is important. I know no one likes e-begging, and especially in these trying times. However, this podcast is 100% free to listen to, and I, as everyone else, have bills and audio engineers to pay.
So if, and only if, you can afford a cup of coffee from your local cafe, consider donating the same amount on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast to support your humble host. Donating on Patreon does not come without benefits.
If you join the TSK $10 Plus Club, you get access to 100% exclusive bonus episodes where I go into detail in other dark areas of human behavior. The newest episode there features the most gruesome murder of all time, in your humble host's humble opinion.
More bonus content is coming very soon, I promise. So, don't miss out. Head on over to patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast and join now. Imagine if you will, dear listener, being whisked away to the northeast of Canada.
There is a province there called New Brunswick, and the largest city of this weather-worn coastal place is Miramichi. Its nickname is Canada's Irish capital, due to its many citizens of Irish heritage. The city sits at the mouth of the Miramichi River, where it enters Miramichi Bay. It's a very picturesque city. If you're red, as I have,
Any Stephen King novels or short stories, you will know what kind of place it is. Very idyllic, very pretty, and under all that charm, a dark and sinister underbelly. Miramichi's most notorious example of the latter came screaming into this world just three years after the end of World War II.
Alan Joseph Legere was born on the 13th of February 1948 in Catham, a suburb of Miramichi. From a very early age, he did not have a father. His father left his small family early on. Left was Alan with a single mother and a younger brother. From very early on, records show that Alan Legere was a normal kid and loved his family.
This being the 1950s, being a single mother was very uncommon, and the small Legere family had trouble getting by financially too. Working and taking care of a family was even more challenging for a single mother back in those days than it is today. But the three of them managed as best they could, although they certainly was marginalized in the community.
Alan attended a local town school, along with his younger brother, and made a few friends. However, even from a very early age, things were beginning to go wrong for Alan. The other children made fun of Alan and his younger brother due to their absent father, and he would often...
feel left out at school events when he would see other children coming with both parents while only his mother was in attendance. Alan was a rather large kid, and he didn't experience the kind of physical bullying many other marginalized kids did. He did, however, experience what might be even worse, being left out and laughed at.
What he did develop during all this was a bond with his younger brother, with whom he began to share stories of his day. The two Legers became inseparable in their hardship. It did not take long for young Alan to develop a deep-seated anger against the community of his city. He began to feel that people were only there to laugh and make fun of others, and weren't there to help or befriend.
Oftentimes, in their small apartment in Chatham, Alan would sit and talk to his mother about his increasing hate against the community in general. Although his mother faced similar feelings of being left out and being on the margins of the community, she did not share or encourage her son's developing hatred. She would always reply with the same answer. People were there to love and should be treated with respect and care.
Alan's mother tried her hardest to prevent his negative thoughts about the community. She didn't want him developing hatred towards his own people. She would tell him stories about the goodness of their people, stories of local Canadian heroes, and often share her own life stories. Unfortunately, Alan was not convinced.
Each day in school, he and his younger brother would face a measure of ridicule from a group of other children who would try to gang up on Alan. His hatred turned into disillusionment as he began skipping school in an attempt to shirk away from most people. However, the principal called his mother due to his increasing absence from classes, and Alan was forced to attend class.
Alan managed to complete school by the age of 16 when his younger brother was 15. It was around this time when the first big trauma hit the family, Alan in particular. A truck ran over his beloved younger brother, killing him on the spot. Alan had lost not only his brother, but his closest and only true friend. When his brother died,
Something else died inside Alan as well. By this point in time, relationships within the household had become very strained. His mother no longer had a soft spot for Alan, given the fact that he was not willing to find a proper job. Household expenses were increasing rapidly, and she was hugely frustrated at having to work and do everything by herself.
The death of her youngest child completely shattered Alan's mother. She was heartbroken, and the fact that Alan was, in her view, not willing to support her financially, just compounded her worries and mental problems. She told her son that the wrong person had been killed. It was Alan who should have died, not his brother. Unsurprisingly, this had a very strong mental impact on Alan. At this point,
Alan had nobody to turn to. His mother, whom he had always considered a source of comfort, had begun to hate him in the past few years. He had no close friends, and had gone through a childhood of misery and ridicule, leaving him completely broken and socially inept.
The hatred that he had harbored for the community was now reaching new hates, as he realized he did not fit in anywhere. As he saw it, he didn't care for anyone, and nobody cared about him either. He trusted no one, and nobody trusted him. The feelings of hate had begun to grow inside him to the extent that he decided to leave Chatham. He hated everything about his hometown.
He moved just outside of Ottawa, to the town of Winchester. He tried his luck at car sales, and became a standard daily wage earner. His job was relatively simple, but early life Alan still had not forgotten the way he had been shunned by society.
Success is restricted in the car sales business, as salesmen often clamber and resort to different tactics to get the upper hand on the competition. For Alan, this cutthroat industry was not one he could settle into easily. It could be relatively charming if he worked at it, but he had terrible social skills and selling didn't come naturally to him.
However, he worked hard, and selling cars was to be the only legal job he managed to keep in his life. As with many other serial killers, Alan Legere had huge problems with the opposite sex. Women did not approach him due to his obsessive hate and radical beliefs against people, not to mention his very low prospects of career and money-wise.
No friends and no girlfriends left him by and large a lonely figure in a society full of indifferent people. And so it was that Alan began to resort to crime. His hate fueled his crimes all the more, and he started with stealing. Petty theft proved to be a way for him to satisfy his hatred towards the people.
He was now able to take items, including money, from unsuspecting individuals and leave with a sense of satisfaction for committing the crime. He was in his late twenties at the time and not really very good at steel. He was often caught in the act and beaten as a result. However, the beatings did little to deter Alan from his desires of exacting revenge on the world.
Whereas he had to live on a meager salary from being a car salesman, he was now able to afford more expensive items due to his petty thefts. He began hitting on women more aggressively, oftentimes trying to force them into sexual acts. He attempted rape as well, though it is unclear whether he was ever apprehended on rape accusations or not.
No records exist showing Alan Legere's prior convictions on rape. Furthermore, his petty thefts had escalated into beatings for those who tried to resist him. Legere was now stealing in broad daylight, and he had moved on from pickpocketing to daylight robbery and snatching. He would often threaten his victims with a knife. However, his success as a thief was short-lived.
Unlike most thieves who learned their trade and sleight of hand from a very early age, Alan Legere had begun stealing as he approached his thirties. As a result, he was clumsy and easy to spot. He was an outcast living in an extremely cohesive society, which made it difficult for him to adjust.
In his mid-thirties, and still not having settled with a job or a family to speak of, he lived alone on a farmhouse in Inkerman, just an hour north of Miramichi. Each day was a struggle, as he found it extremely difficult to adjust according to the requirements of most people. Even the people at the car dealership where he worked would make fun of him and laugh at him.
He was unable to rise up the ranks or sell a lot of cars and remained an average salesman until the day he quit. Hey, it's Sharon, and here's where it gets interesting. Raise your hand if you want salon-perfect nails for just $2 a manicure.
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night.
For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Everyone needs someone to talk to, even psychopaths, even your humble host. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp.
Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. That day came shortly before Alan turned 37. He was not interested in working anymore, having been ridiculed his entire life.
decided that he'd had enough of both Winchester and his colleagues. As a result, he handed in his resignation, packed his belongings, and left the farmhouse. This time, he went to Black River Bridge in the Miramichi River Valley. Miramichi today is not the way it was back in 1986.
it was made up of a number of small towns that were connected to each other via roadways located at short distance from each other now however these towns have grown into one forming miramichi city
For this reason, it has been challenging researching where Leger was operating, as contemporary sources naturally use the original names of these small towns. But if you read up on Leger today, the literature will state he operated in Miramichi City.
It was there that Alan Legere would transform from a pathetic small-time thief and car salesman and turn into what is still remembered with horror as the monster of the Miramichi. Mr. John Glenn Denning and his wife were a typical Canadian, that is to say pleasant, couple who owned a small shop and lived above it.
A veritable mom-and-pop shop, if you will. They enjoyed meeting up with their customers and sharing tidbits of news and pieces of information with them. John Glenn Denning had no enemies to speak of and would open up the store quite early in the morning, attend to his customers, and chat with them each day. It was a simple life that he and his wife were living, and they enjoyed their simple and love-filled life immensely.
Alan Legere was thirty-eight years old at the time. He had little to nothing to show for his long career as a middling car salesman. What little savings he had collected while working in Winchester selling cars was now dwindling towards the end, and Alan was soon going to be broke. But he had devised a plan.
Alan Legere had been frequenting Mr. Glen Denning's shop for several days and had become quite familiar with the man. Mr. Glen Denning suspected no ill intentions from Alan towards himself, his family, or his business, and, being an elderly man of sixty-six, he had no apparent reason to either. For Alan Legere, however, he had found a target.
he had seen the safe that mr glendinning kept in his shop and had become quite inquisitive through small talk he had managed to find out that mr glendinning kept all of his savings that he made from the shop in that safe for a leger this seemed like an easy enough job all he would have to do is to break into the shop and steal the safe he could pry it open in his own surroundings later
the job seemed standard fare though it is worth while to note that leger had not committed a crime of this magnitude before he was used to petty thefts not premeditated grand robberies despite his inexperience leger understood he could not do it alone
He needed the help of some accomplices, who would help him break into the shop and, most importantly, assist in carrying the heavy steel safe back to their own place. But Legere could not exactly post bulletins in the local paper asking for hired help robbing a place, so he began hanging around with people who were much younger.
He found the accomplices he was looking for in the shape of Todd Matchett, 18 years old, and Scott Curtis, 19 years old. When Legere met the pair, Matchett and Curtis already had a track record of six years of petty thefts between them, and Legere thought they were ideal for the job he had planned. It should be known that Legere himself had a lengthy criminal history by that time.
and he was not interested in making friends. He wanted a simple deal in which all three would benefit from the money. Legere was not a very intelligent man, but he had street smarts, and was to a degree clever. He had chosen young accomplices to work with, for he knew that most of the kids could easily be controlled. Also, he had developed an imposing aura by that time,
taking pride in his well-developed muscled body and reputation as a bad man you didn't want to mess with. Coupled by the lengthy record of criminal history that Legere had accumulated in his time, the two teenagers were more than impressed, and almost felt that he could help them become better criminals.
Along with the two, Legere devised a plan to rob Mr. Glenn Denning's shop and steal the safe. They would break in during the night, cut the power, detach the safe, and move out with it. There was no plan to hurt anyone. At least the two youngsters didn't plan on it. Legere, however, knew that it was very much a possibility they might be caught by Mr. Glenn Denning.
And that is exactly why he had chosen the elderly man as a target. And so it was that on the warm summer night of the 21st of June, 1986, Alan Legere, along with his accomplices Todd Matchett and Scott Curtis, entered the Glen Denning shop. They headed straight for the fuse box and cut to power. Up until then, Legere's plan had worked flawlessly.
They had entered the shop after breaking the lock and had cut the fuse box successfully. However, Mr. Glenn Denning was woken up by the commotion downstairs, and when all the lights went out, he knew there was trouble. The trio was shocked when they discovered the safe wasn't where Legere thought it should be.
Mr. Glenn Denning had moved it upstairs, probably to avoid it getting stolen by people exactly like Alan Legere. Now, what happened next is not at all like you would see in the movies. Mr. Glenn Denning's wife did not urge her husband to go downstairs to see what the noise was.
He was not a stupid man, and understood perfectly that moving towards sounds of obvious burglary could easily spell his doom. The criminal trio, however, wasn't happy with the prospect of leaving empty-handed. So they, at the behest of Legere, started to move upstairs. They wanted the safe, and they knew the elderly couple upstairs knew where it was.
When they got upstairs, they entered the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Glen Denning and started torturing the couple for information about the safe. When the beaten and bloodied Mr. Glen Denning became unresponsive, they left him on the floor in a pool of blood and proceeded towards his wife. Mrs. Glen Denning was beaten in a similar manner to her husband, though not as severely.
However, she was dragged down and the elderly woman was then raped by all three individuals. After the assault, Legere said to his accomplices that they couldn't leave with the safe now, that they had created such a scene, and so they decided to flee the residence empty-handed anyway.
When Mrs. Glenn Denning regained consciousness, she realized that she was downstairs and that she was naked. Covering herself, she crawled upstairs and dialed 911. She was scared out of her mind and wouldn't leave the phone until the police forces arrived on the scene, which they did shortly after. Neither Legere nor his accomplices had banked on the police getting involved. They had left her to die.
But luckily she had survived her ordeal. She had seen the faces of the three men and was actively helping with the investigation. All three of the criminals were inexperienced when it came to burglary and robbery and had left a lot of clues nearby, including pieces of torn clothing from the scuffle that had ensued.
it took less than a month for the police to track down leger and his accomplices the police had more than enough evidence available to capture the three the brutal nature of the death of mr glendenning sent shock waves in the small community of black river bridge
Alan Legere was convicted of second-degree murder and was handed a sentence of life in prison with the eligibility for parole after 18 years. Both Curtis and Matchett were quick to claim that Legere was a ringleader in the crime, a claim that Legere did not refute. The 18-year sentence further compounded the anger and hate Alan had built up inside of him.
He considered the death of Glenn Denning as an accomplishment of sorts and seemed proud of it too. Almost immediately after the trial, Legere decided he would appeal the murder conviction and filed an appeal in court soon after.
On the 8th of August, 1987, the New Brunswick Court of Appeals came to the verdict that the appeal lodged by Mr. Alan Legere bore no viable grounds and was chucked out of the court almost as soon as it was brought under review. However, Legere was not done.
he filed another appeal and this time to the supreme court of canada while he was serving his sentence he had been serving for two years by then and wanted out as soon as possible but he did not have the means curiously most of the people he had befriended at the prison referred to him as a master manipulator and he was able to put his skills to use just a couple of years later
While in prison, he was visited by one of the most prominent lawyers of Canada, C. David Hughes. Legere showed him a side of his story that Hughes thought was viable enough to contest the murder conviction and decided to pick up the case. On the 20th of February, 1987, a murder appeal was held before the Supreme Court of Canada, with David Hughes representing Legere.
It, too, was unsuccessful. After his appeal was turned down, Legere knew he was out of options. There were no further legal means through which he could facilitate his release, and Legere refused to accept his sentence. He had already considered the possibility that the Supreme Court would reject his appeal and had been secretly devising a plan
to escape.
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As dawn broke over the seven seas, the pirates of the Crimson Galleon set sail for adventure.
But there was one problem. Paperwork. Mountains of it. Filing, invoices, you name it. This work ain't fit for a pilot. Luckily, their captain had an idea. She used the smart buying tools on Amazon Business so they could work more efficiently and get back to doing what they do best. I know, right? Amazon Business, your partner for smart business buying. And so ends part one of the tale of Alan Legere.
I hope you enjoyed listening to me telling it to you. The next episode, number 121 in number, will feature how Legere managed to escape and what truly earned him the nickname of the Monster of the Miramichi. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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