THE SECOND LARGEST MANHUNT IN CANADA 

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Lifelong friends Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18,  lived in the small town of Port Alberni that is situated in Vancouver Island, British Columbia that is  the western province in Canada.  I visited that town in 1955. It was smaller then.

The police said that the pair had not been in contact with their families for a few days. I am sure that they had a cell phone between them.

Their family members said that the two were travelling north to Whitehorse in the Yukon to visit and to look for work. 

I will tell you something about these two teenagers.

Madison Hempsted said that she went to school with one of the accused murderers. She said this about Schmegelsky. “’When he did talk to people, the things he said were kind of scary. I don’t want to be rude but all he ever said to me was how he wanted to kill me and he described ways he would do it.”

Ms. Hempsted also said that she and others that knew Schmegelsky made comments about his alleged remarks on Facebook but the remarks were all later deleted. One of her friends claimed she had heard Schmegelsky say that he wanted to kill his whole family. Ms. Hempsted also said, “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. He didn’t have very many friends.”                                                                

There is no doubt in my opinion that this teenager was a weirdo with a psychotic mind.  

Mr, Schmegelsky revealed that his son  had told him he and McLeod had been “training in war” in the woods for more than two years and were masters of camouflage.

He described his son’s upbringing as being troubled, with his parents going through a bitter separation in 2005. He said, “The boy, then aged five, moved with his mother to the small Vancouver Island community of Port Alberni, where he met McLeod. They attended the same elementary school and quickly became inseparable best friends.”

Mr. McLeod had predicted that his son, Kam would die in a gunfight with police.  The distraught father said his son was on a “suicide mission” and expected he would be killed by police within 48 hours. “They’re going to go out in a blaze of glory” That amount of time had  already  passed and he was still alive.

Alas, there is no determination as to what their motives were for these two teens to murder their three victims and possibly four victims. If they were captured alive, they would face at least two life terms of 25 years to be served consecutively thus totalling 50 years in prison  for each of them. If McLeod was convicted of second degree murder, the 20-year sentence could not be added to his 50-year sentence as per the law in Canada. 

The two teens were suspected of going on a murderous rampage which claimed the lives of Australian. Lucas Fowler, 23 and his American girlfriend, Chynna Deese, 24, who were gunned down on a lonely Highway in British Columbia on July 14^th, 2019.

The bodies of 23-year-old Australian Lucas Fowler and 24-year-old American Chynna Deese were discovered about 20 kilometres south of Liard Hot Springs, at a remote spot off Highway 97, also known as the Alaska Highway.  The RCMP said that the couple were shot and killed sometime on either July 14^th or July 15^th.

The police did, however, offer new information about the last moments of the young adventurers, Mr. Fowler and Ms. Deese — a couple who met in Croatia and fell in love. Sgt Shoihet said they were “victims of gun violence” and had been involved in a discussion with a man on the side of the road the night before their bodies were found according to a motorist who drove past them.

The RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) are the federal police but they are also the provincial police in British Columbia.

A Canadian man, Leonard Dyck, 64, a UBC lecturer was also murdered a few a hundred kilometres away on that same notorious highway the following day.

The two teens had been travelling and working their way through B.C. on a three-week road trip to Alaska. They were headed to Liard Hot Springs which is a popular tourist destination in the far north of the province and is about 160 kilometres southeast of Watson Lake in the Yukon.

 In 1942, the route that the highway took was more to the north of today's highway, and it was not as long as it is now. Highway 16 originally ran from New Hazelton east to an obscure location known as Aleza Lake. In 1947, Highway 16's western end was moved from New Hazelton to the coastal city of Prince Rupert, and in 1953, the highway was re-aligned to end at Prince George. In 1969, further alignment east into Yellowhead Pass was opened to traffic after being constructed up through 1968 and raised to all-weather standards in 1969. Highway 16's alignment on the  Haida Gwaii was commissioned in 1984, with BC  Ferries beginning service along Highway 16 to the Haida Gwaii the following year. A series of murders and disappearances has given the stretch between Prince Rupert and Prince George the name Highway of Tears since so many Canadian native women and girls have vanished in the area  of that highway.

My wife and I have driven on that highway on three occasions while we were visiting British Columbia where I lived as a child and as an adult.

A burning truck fitted with a sleeping camper was found 50 kilometres south of Dease Lake in British Columbia which is about 500 kilometres west of Liard Hot Springs. The vehicle belonged to the two suspects.

I don’t know why it was burned but McLeod and Schmegelsky had been driving north in it.

Shortly after the RCMP police arrived at the truck fire, two passing motorists told the officers that they had just seen what they believed was to be a body at a nearby highway pullout.

The RCMP found the body of a man about two kilometres away from the burned camper. The police had not revealed his identity nor the cause of death at that time. The man was Leonard Dyck, age 64 as I mentioned earlier.  He was between 5 feet 8 inches and five feet 10 inches in height, with a heavy build, grey hair and a full grey beard, according to the police report.

Around this time, the public and numerous news stories began to link the incidents, if only because it's unusual to have five people declared missing or dead under suspicious circumstances in Northern B.C. in the space of a week.

On July 21^st, surveillance footage captured McLeod and Schmegelsky inside a hardware store in Meadow Lake in the Province of Saskchewan. The 16-second clip showed the pair walking down an aisle and leaving the store without any bags in hand.

 At this point, the RCMP had not publicly named McLeod and Schmegelsky as homicide suspects because they weren’t sure if they were the suspects they were looking for.

The police said that the two were last spotted in northern Saskatchewan driving a grey 2011 Toyota. ’ It obviously wasn’t their vehicle. What happened to the owner of that vehicle? Did they murder the owner of that vehicle?  We may never know since neither he or she were never found dead or alive.

On the 24^th, the RCMP confirmed that the burnt-out vehicle found in Manitoba on July 22^nd was the same one driven by McLeod and Schmegelsky. Did they burn the vehicle to hide their fingerprints?

That same day, the police filed charges against the suspects with second degree murder for the death of Dyck. I have to assume that before Dyck died, he left a note describing his killers. I don’t know how the police determined that it was second degree murder and not first degree murder without such a note.

The police began an extensive search of a native community of the Cree Nation and nearby Fox Lake in the province of Manitoba.

Nathan Neckoway, a councillor for Tataskweyak Cree Nation at Split Lake, said the two men fuelled up at a local gas station. They also went through a check stop and were questioned by band constables who did not know at that time that the two men were murder suspects. He said that The men had camping gear and maps in the back seat of their vehicle. The gear and sleeping bags nust have belonged to the driver of the Toyota.

By then, the RCMP revealed that the Port Alberni teens​​​​ were seriously considered the main suspects in the three deaths they knew of’ thusly, a manhunt for the two teens began.

        

 No one was aware that Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky had  earlier quietly slipped through the First Nation checkpoint in northern Manitoba on July 22^nd.

One week after the two men became the focus of an intense manhunt in northern Manitoba after they were publicly identified as suspects in three known B.C. homicides, the people who live in the town  of Gillam after  the pair’s last confirmed whereabouts were announced,  continued to take caution as the search for the pair dragged on.

The RCMP said that the heavy police presence in York Landing, another small town in Manitoba had been withdrawn after officers were unable to substantiate a tip that two individuals matching the description of the suspects were spotted near a garbage dump in the small community.

Gillam is a small town on the Nelson River in northern Manitoba, It is situated between the towns of Thompson and Churchill on the Hudson Bay Railway line. Its population is less than a thousand.

A Canadian Air Force CC-130H Hercules aircraft equipped with high-tech thermal detection gear and soldiers joined the search. The Police also used drones and tracking dogs while officers went door to door checking every home and abandoned buildings.

One of the challenges facing the searchers was the heavily wooded forests and bushes that extended for miles that were primarily surrounded by water so tramping through the forests was difficult especially when the biting insects were attacking their bare faces. Anyone who has ever been bitten by a northern black fly will attest as to their ferocity.  It drives horses mad.

The search area covered eleven thousand square kilometres.

 After the army left, the RCMP said that said that they would remain in Gillam, but a check stop on the only road into the community had been taken down.

The RCMP were still refocusing their attention on the Gillam, Manitoba area after the latest tip in the manhunt for the two suspects in another area of Manitoba  turned up empty.

The RCMP said that they found items belonging to the two suspects on the shoreline of Nelson River. The items were probably previously in the aluminum boat before it had sunk in the river.

Police said that they located the bodies of two males at ten in the morning of August 6^th near the shoreline of the Nelson River and approximately 8 km from the burned-out vehicle. The police were silent as to whether or not the bodies were those of the suspects until an autopsy was done.

On August 13^th the medical examiner had revealed that the two teenage murder suspects who led authorities on a desperate 15-day manhunt across Canada died of apparent suicide by gunfire,  

Their deaths have saved the taxpayers as much as eleven million dollars that they would have had to pay to imprison the two killers for the fifty years  in prison if they had lived.