YOUNGSTOWN — Mahoning County Common Pleas Court officials have sent a notice to Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare in Columbus and asked officials to evaluate Samuel Legg III, accused of committing a murder at a former truck stop in Austintown in 1992.

Legg, 53, a former truck driver, also is accused of three other killings in Ohio and Illinois.

Judge John Durkin ruled in October 2020 that time had run out for Legg to be restored to competency to stand trial in the murder of Sharon Kedzierski of Florida. The judge also found that Legg needed to be confined to a state mental-health hospital and remain under supervision of the judge indefinitely.

After six months there, the judge ruled that Legg needed to remain there for at least two more years. But it has been two years since that evaluation and ruling, so it is time for Legg to be evaluated again. It will result in another hearing before Durkin in the coming weeks.

Authorities could not identify the badly beaten body of Kedzierski, 43, in 1992 but did so 20 years later using DNA. Her death was from blunt-force trauma to the head, face and chest, a coroner ruled.

DNA also identified Legg as a suspect after an Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation analyst took a new look at unmatched DNA samples in 2017.

Legg was later linked to the 1997 rape of a girl in Medina County, the 1997 murder of a woman in Western Illinois and the 1996 murder of a woman in Wood County near Toledo. Those jurisdictions also had pending cases against Legg at the time Legg was ruled to be not competent to stand trial.

Mahoning County Assistant Prosecutor Mike Yacovone said the other jurisdictions appeared to be waiting to see the outcome of the Mahoning County case to determine what their next step may be.

Kedzierski’s oldest daughter, Katherine Kedzierski Kuring, was allowed to give a victim impact statement at the 2020 Mahoning County hearing, emotionally talking about Legg as she read from prepared remarks that expressed the pain and frustration she experienced.

Kedzierski Kuring did not know for 22 years whether her mother was alive or dead after she disappeared around 1989, just after she and Kedzierski Kuring’s father got divorced.

Kedzierski Kuring and her sister, Christine, hired a private investigator and tried many other methods of trying to locate their mother.

“Emotionally, over the years, I would oscillate between missing my mom and desperately worrying for her safety and feeling unloved and unworthy for a mother to reach out to her daughter,” she said.

“I would interrogate myself for an answer as to why any mother would not need to find her child. Why isn’t she trying to find me? I streamed through every memory to find an offense I may have committed against her to warrant her abandonment,” she said.

“In my grandfather’s final years, he shared from his reclining chair, ‘If I could just get in the car and drive, I would look for her,'” she said.

“Since my mother’s body was, at last, identified in 2013, I have wanted to confront the monster that took her life,” she said, looking at Legg.

“My mother had done nothing to deserve such violence, hatred and desecration to her body,” she said. “Sam Legg is a creature of the worst kind. I am bewildered how my beloved God created this personification of evil.”