Allan Legere escaped custody in 1989 and was convicted in 1991 of four murders in New Brunswick's Miramichi area, in an early Canadian case that used DNA evidence to convict.
Crime Canada newsroomPublished
Allan Legere, born in 1948 in Chatham, New Brunswick, was convicted in November 1991 of four murders committed in the Miramichi area in 1989. He committed them after escaping custody while he was serving a sentence for murder in a 1986 home invasion at Black River Bridge. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for 25 years. He was denied parole in 2021 and in 2025, and he died in custody at Edmonton Institution on March 9, 2026, at the age of 78.
On the evening of June 21, 1986, Legere and two accomplices, Todd Matchett and Scott Curtis, broke into the property of an elderly couple in Black River Bridge, New Brunswick, after cutting the power. The couple was severely beaten. The husband died of his injuries. His wife regained consciousness, reached the telephone and called 911, and the dispatcher stayed on the line with her until police arrived.
Legere was later held at the Atlantic Institution, a maximum-security penitentiary in Renous-Quarryville run by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC). On May 3, 1989, CSC staff took him to the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont Regional Hospital in Moncton for treatment of an ear infection. He persuaded the officers to let him use a washroom alone. There he used a piece of metal he had hidden to open his handcuffs, kept the officers at a distance and left the building. He then avoided recapture by taking vehicles, including by carjacking.
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Legere remained at large from May 3 to November 24, 1989. During that time, four people were killed in the Miramichi area:
After the 1986 killing, police traced and arrested the three men responsible. Matchett pleaded guilty to the murder. Curtis and Legere were convicted at trial.
During the 1989 manhunt, a reward of $50,000 was offered for information leading to Legere's arrest. On November 17, 1989, a VIA Rail agent sold him a ticket for a train to Montreal. A Sûreté du Québec officer later identified him as having been on board. The officer searched the train in Quebec City but did not detain him, because he had no photograph of the suspect and was relying on a description that mentioned a tattoo, which he did not see.
On November 23, 1989, Legere threatened a taxi driver in Saint John with a sawed-off rifle and ordered him to drive toward Moncton. The taxi slid off the snowy highway. An off-duty RCMP constable stopped to help, and Legere forced her to drive while holding her and the taxi driver hostage. During a fuel stop in Sussex, the two hostages got away in the taxi. Legere then forced a truck driver to continue the trip in his tractor-trailer. After a night on the road, the truck turned onto the Barnaby River Road. Another trucker saw it there, knew trucks were not allowed on that road and called police on his CB radio. RCMP officers stopped the truck on Route 118, about 10 kilometres from Newcastle, on November 24, 1989, and arrested Legere without incident.
In August 1990, Legere was convicted on charges related to his escape and received an additional nine years. He was indicted for the four 1989 murders in November 1990. While on trial in 1991, he was held at the provincial jail in Fredericton.
The trial was among the first in Canada in which DNA profiling was used to convict rather than to exonerate. His lawyer argued that the relatively small gene pool of the Miramichi region could easily produce false matches. In November 1991, Legere was convicted of all four murders. The French-language source states that he was sentenced on November 3, 1991.
For the 1986 murder, the French-language source states that Legere, Matchett and Curtis were each sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole eligibility for 16 years. For the 1989 murders, Legere was sentenced to life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for 25 years.
After his recapture, he was moved to a high-security prison to prevent another escape. According to the French-language source, he was transferred in 2005 to Canada's super-maximum security penitentiary, known as the "SHU", in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec. In 2015, he was transferred from there to Edmonton Institution in Alberta.
In August 2020, he applied for day parole, a request that raised concerns in the Miramichi community. The Parole Board of Canada denied his application at a hearing on January 13, 2021. His appeal of that decision was rejected on July 7, 2021. He was denied parole again on December 12, 2025.
Legere died in custody at Edmonton Institution on March 9, 2026, at the age of 78. The French-language source states that the circumstances were not known at the time and that a review would be carried out to determine the cause.
The Legere trial is cited as one of the first Canadian cases in which DNA profiling was used to obtain a conviction. That legacy was later marked publicly: after Fredericton's provincial jail closed in 1996 and became a science museum in 1999, the cell where he was held during his 1991 trial was used for an exhibit on DNA profiling.
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