Teen killers found dead

Motives may never be revealed

BRYER Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod are dead, and the world may never know why the teenagers embarked on a Canadian highway killing spree that began with the senseless deaths of Australian tourist Lucas Fowler and his US girlfriend Chynna Deese.

The desperate three-week manhunt stretching 5000km across Canada – longer than the distance between Sydney and Perth – ended on Wednesday in thick scrub in a remote area of Manitoba.

Schmegelsky and McLeod, both 19, were dead.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police found the two bodies about 1km from the banks of the Nelson River, near the small town of Gillam, the centre of the manhunt for the past two weeks.

“We believe they are in fact the individuals we were searching for,” RCMP British Columbia assistant commissioner Kevin Hackett told reporters. Autopsies were due to be held overnight.

Inspector Hackett declined to speculate on what killed the teenagers.

The heartbreaking saga began on July 15 in the western province of British Columbia when the bodies of Mr Fowler, 23, from Sydney, and Ms Deese, 24, from North Carolina, were found in a ditch beside their broken down blue 1986 Chevrolet van.

The lovestruck couple was on a Canadian road trip.

Four days later Leonard Dyck, a 64-year-old botanist, was found dead on another BC highway, his Toyota RAV4 was missing and 2km away a Dodge pick-up truck was set on fire.

The Dodge was identified as McLeod’s but he, along with best mate Schmegelsky, had vanished and the RCMP initially treated them as missing. The teenagers drove the stolen RAV4 3000km east along Canada’s north to Gillam and on July 22 dumped it in bushland and set it on fire.

On July 24 the RCMP named the two teenagers as suspects in the three murders.

A huge deployment of police manpower descended on Gillam and more than 11,000sq km of wilderness was searched by officers on the ground and by air, drones, helicopters and Royal Canadian Air Force planes.

The teenagers were not found.

It appeared the duo had fled a further 2000km east in the province of Ontario after members of the public, after widespread media and social media coverage, provided more than 30 false sightings within an eight-hour period.