The coldest comfort
The hunt for two killers might be over but the discovery of their bodies will bring no relief for the parents of victims Lucas Fowler and Chynna Deese.
There were fears it would end in a bloody shootout with police — two Canadian teenagers wanted for three highway killings going out all guns blazing.
The real end appears much more subdued, with the discovery of the bodies of the two in dense scrub in remote northern Manitoba province at 10am on Wednesday (1am yesterday, AEST).
A desperate nationwide manhunt over thousands of kilometres, watched around the world for nearly three weeks, was over.
“I’m confident it is them,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police assistant commissioner Jane MacLatchy said.
There was relief that the violence would end, especially for the Mounties, who have been under increasing scrutiny over their early actions in the investigation.
Could they have acted sooner? Had they let two suspected killers — Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky — slip away, possibly to kill again?
Now, with the deaths of the teenagers, the question that may never be answered is what drove them, seemingly, to murder three people: Australian Lucas Fowler, 23; his American girlfriend, Chynna Deese, 24; and university botanist Leonard Dyck, 64.
Final embrace
Deese’s mother, Sheila, has watched the footage a thousand times. It shows her daughter, from Charlotte in North Carolina, with Fowler at a service station at Fort Nelson in the Northern Rockies on the evening of Saturday, July 13.
Fowler is filling up their van, a pale blue 1986 Chevrolet straight from a backpacker’s dream. His long blond curls are tied back and he stretches his back, loosening up after being behind the wheel. Deese in the CCTV footage is so busy, cleaning every window, always one to chip in.
Who knows what a camera may record when you’re not expecting it to be broadcast globally? For Fowler and Deese, it recorded nothing but love. Deese throws her arms around Fowler and they hug. The last footage of Deese and Fowler alive would be of the warmest embrace. Two devastated families will always have that hug. “I watched it over and over,” Sheila said. “That video, being the last thing, is a gift to me, of how happy they were.”
The next day, the couple were seen beside the Alaska Highway, their van broken down and their dream just starting to become a nightmare.
Lovers and adventurers
Fowler and Deese had met as backpackers at a hostel in Croatia in 2017. They fell in love and had been on a global odyssey ever since.
Fowler, from Sydney, son of a senior NSW police officer, loved the outdoors — camping, four-wheel driving and dirt-biking. He’d been working as a general ranch hand at a sprawling 14,000ha property in the Canadian province of British Columbia, where he was kept busy with 2000 bison and beef cattle. His family was enthralled and, they admit, a little envious of his adventures.
“This is what happens when you are out checking fences on a snowmobile in minus 36 degrees,” Fowler remarked in one message, accompanying a photo of his hair and beard full of ice.
“Easy way to get a haircut — just snap it off’,” replied his dad, Stephen Fowler, chief inspector of Sydney’s northwest Hills district.
Deese, living in the US, came to meet Fowler at the ranch for their long-planned road trip to Alaska. She was as hands-on as ever before they set off, helping with branding and tagging.
“He was the sweetest boy who had found the love of his life,” said ranch owner Christoph Weder, who sold Fowler the blue Chevy for $1500. “They lived for the moment.”
Fowler used his mechanical skills to do up the van himself. No one had any reason to suspect things would go so wrong.
Beside the highway, when the van broke down, there was no sense of panic from the couple. Canadians Curtis and Sandra Broughton stopped to offer a hand about 3.20pm that Sunday. The young Australian seemed on top of the situation, so the Broughtons drove home.
“The vehicle was flooded out and they were going to try and get it going again until they could get the parts they needed,” said Curtis, a mechanic.
Fowler and Deese were found shot dead the next morning. They were lying face down in a ditch beside the Alaska Highway, about 20km south of Liard Hot Springs, British Columbia. Their van was nearby, its back window smashed; the glass had been intact in the service station CCTV footage
.
Investigation begins
Four days later, on July 19, the Mounties had another major investigation on their hands after a burning red and grey Dodge ute was found on Highway 37 near Dease Lake, British Columbia. A man’s body was lying in a highway rest stop 2km from the truck. It was about 470km from where Fowler and Deese were murdered.
In Australia, Fowler’s father, mother Shaunagh and other family members left Sydney for Canada with two NSW homicide detectives acting as liaison officers. They flew into a rapidly developing investigation. The RCMP announced two teenagers who had been driving the burnt-out ute were missing. The teens were named as McLeod, 19, and Schmegelsky, then 18, from Vancouver Island’s Port Alberni.
It was possible all events were linked, and investigators were exchanging information, the RCMP told media.
Significantly, that was as far as the advice went. If the RCMP already knew or suspected the teens were killers, it did not say so publicly. It was, however, keen to hose down media speculation that the events could be linked to the murder or disappearance of at least 18 women on British Columbia’s Yellowhead Highway 16, known as the “Highway of Tears” murders.
Wanted for murder
On July 23, the RCMP announced the teenagers weren’t just missing, they were suspects in the murders of Fowler, Deese and the man found dead in the highway rest stop, identified as Dyck. Upping the stakes, McLeod and Schmegelsky were charged with Dyck’s murder in their absence. Known to be travelling in a stolen Toyota RAV4, they were declared highly dangerous. “Do not approach. Take no action and call immediately 911,” RCMP Sergeant Janelle Shoihet said.
Deese’s older brother, Stetson, wasn’t so sure at the time. He told The Australian he was reserving judgment until the teenagers were found and the evidence laid out against them.
Stetson and Chynna had a shared passion: travel. Being the older brother, Stetson was the first to hit the road. Chynna watched him head off to work seasonal jobs in national parks such as Yellowstone, and to an Alaskan fishing village that attracted wealthy and high-profile clients. As soon as she could, she was travelling too.
“I thought I was a traveller, then all of a sudden she was doing a tour around Europe, Central America, South America and eventually Canada,” Stetson said.
Not long before her murder, Deese applied for work at the Alaskan fishing village that had employed her brother for four or so summers, but she hadn’t heard back. She went on the road trip with Fowler instead.
“I think they were just kind of waiting on something to cool down, and something came out of nowhere,” he said. “What might have happened, whatever came out of nowhere, there was an intent to save each other and it just completely backfired.” Fowler was already part of the family. “They probably would have been on their way to get engaged and possibly married.”
Evil boys
Sheila wanted investigators to be relentless in the search for her daughter’s killers. “I want this to be personal, this was someone’s son, someone’s daughter,” she said. After McLeod and Schmegelsky were named as suspects, she called them “evil, evil boys”.
The delay in declaring the teens suspects allowed them to slip away. An unsuspecting good Samaritan, Tommy Ste-Croix, helped the pair get their bogged RAV4 out of a muddy field on July 21, two days before they were named suspects.
“Mum and dad’s going to be pissed,” Ste-Croix told the fugitives as he came across their stranded vehicle in Cold Lake, Alberta. The pair were polite, shook his hand and told him their real names.
A couple of “band constables” — or community police — stopped the teenagers for a routine alcohol check in the dry Manitoba reserve of the Tataskweyak Cree Nation. It was July 22, the day before they were declared suspects, and they were allowed to leave.
Schmegelsky and McLeod were childhood friends. They were into violent video games and for at least two years had played war games in the woods. Disturbing associations have emerged. Last year, Schmegelsky shared with online gamers photographs of himself with Nazi memorabilia and in military fatigues. A former neighbour, Lisa Lucas, said he’d made people uncomfortable when he flashed around pictures of himself wearing a Nazi armband.
One former classmate, Madison Hempsted, said Schmegelsky would say at times “he wanted to kill us and then himself”. “(He) would say things about how he would cut our heads off and then he would take a gun and put it in his mouth and shoot himself in front of us. Pretty detailed stuff,” she said.
The two friends left Port Alberni only days before they are suspected to have murdered Fowler and Deese, and apparently dropped out of contact with family. Schmegelsky’s father, Alan, went from talking about his son as missing and a potential victim to warning that the teenager would not be taken alive.
“He’s on a suicide mission … They’re going to go out in a blaze of glory. Trust me on this,” he said.
Police breakthrough
The RAV4 was found burnt out on July 22 near Gillam, a town with only one road in and out, in Manitoba. It was 3000km from where the fugitive teens are suspected to have murdered Fowler and Deese, and became the epicentre of the search.
Heavily armed police descended with armoured vehicles in preparation for the worst. Drones, helicopters, Royal Canadian Air Force planes, boats, police dogs, off-road vehicles and dive teams were used in the search, scouring more than 11,000sq km of wilderness. Locals said that if bears and wolves didn’t get the teens, the mosquitoes and sandflies certainly would.
Sightings reported 2000km east in the province of Ontario proved to be false leads. On Friday, police got their breakthrough when tour guide Clint Sawchuk spotted a blue sleeping bag tangled in shrubs on the Nelson River shoreline. It led to a damaged rowboat. The search narrowed.
“Our officers knew that we just needed to find that one piece of evidence that could move this search forward,” MacLatchy said.
Schmegelsky’s 19th birthday, on Monday, came and went as the Mounties closed in. About 1km from the banks of the Nelson River, the search came to an end with the discovery of the two bodies. A professional tracker was with the RCMP at the time.
It was about 8km from where they’d set fire to the RAV4 near Gillam. Authorities confirmed for the first time yesterday the car was Dyck’s. Was he killed for nothing more than a getaway vehicle?
Autopsies would confirm how Schmegelsky and McLeod had died, the RCMP said. They’d intended to charge the pair over the deaths of Fowler and Deese but have revealed little about their investigation. RCMP assistant commissioner Kevin Hackett said there was “significant evidence that links both crime scenes together”. But he said it was “going to be extremely difficult for us to ascertain definitively what the motive was”.
Stephen Fowler said his son “lived a life that many of us envied”. A life taken too soon, for no discernible reason.
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