EARLY END FOR TEEN FUGITIVES
In the end, the immense manhunt through northern Manitoba’s rugged hinterland might well have been over before it even really began, although no one knew at the time.
Two bodies the RCMP are “confident” are those of Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, were found Wednesday just eight kilometres from where they dumped and burned their SUV, the discovery of which sparked an immense search through forest, bog and river and of every home and building in small
outback communities.
Once on foot, they never travelled far, and probably not for long.
“We knew that we just needed to find that one piece of evidence that could move this search forward,” said Assistant Commissioner Jane MacLatchy, commanding officer of the Manitoba RCMP.
On Friday, police found “that one critical piece of evidence,” she said — unspecified items directly linked to the suspects discovered on the shoreline of the Nelson River. A sleeping bag and a damaged boat were apparently among the items, community members said.
At about 10 a.m. local time Wednesday, a specialized RCMP team found two bodies in dense brush, less than a kilometre from those items.
The search RCMP mounted over two weeks and two days had been robust, some say unprecedented — involving drones, dogs, boats, quads, airplanes, helicopters, trucks and lots of careful hiking to search about 11,000 square kilometres west of Hudson Bay.
With no further signs after more than a week, the RCMP scaled back its equipment and personnel and said the fugitives may have left the area. Celebrity fugitive hunters and crime pundits told the media the two men were probably long gone, perhaps sunning in Mexico.
But the locals in Gillam, Man., didn’t buy it.
Many remained convinced there was no way out.
“You have to know the land to get around here. If you don’t, it will eat you up,” said Leroy Constant, chief of the York Factory First Nation. If they tried to escape along the Nelson River, as it appears they tried to do, they would never make it, “they’d be sucked into the current,” he said during the search.
“This is the end of the road,” Jesse Taylor, a Gillam man who spends his free time in the wilderness, said at the time. “This is the deadend corner of the world.”
For McLeod and Schmegelsky, friends since elementary school, it truly was, assuming the preliminary identifications are correct. The bodies were found close to Taylor’s favourite moose-hunting spot.
Police did not release how they died. An autopsy has been ordered. Schmegelsky would have turned 19 on Monday, if he lived that long.
Their journey started on July 12, the date when Schmegelsky’s father said the pair left their home in Port Alberni, B.C., about 160 kilometres west of Vancouver, with a purported plan to head north looking for work.
It seems they secretly had a different plan altogether.
Days later, on July 15, two bodies were discovered, shot dead along Highway 97.
Chynna Deese, 24, and Lucas Fowler, 23, had been on a road trip across Canada together. Their bodies were found near Liard Hot Springs in northern B.C. Deese was an American and Fowler an Australian, which brought international attention to the case.
Four days later, on July 19, the body of Leonard Dyck, 64, a University of British Columbia lecturer, was found near Dease Lake, B.C., 475 km from the first crime scene.
At first, McLeod and Schmegelsky were described only as missing — perhaps even further victims of some unknown northern highway killer — when police found their burned-out truck two kilometres from Dyck’s body.
Six days and a twisting 2,000-kilometre drive east later, as police pondered what had happened in B.C., a Toyota SUV was stranded in mud behind a hospital in Cold Lake, Alta. Tommy SteCroix went to lend a hand.
After pulling the Toyota out, he shook the two young men’s hands, he said. They thanked him and said their real names. It was McLeod and Schmegelsky — but only later were they identified as murder suspects. That was on July 21.
They continued east and were caught on a security camera in a store in Meadow Lake, Sask., about 150 kilometres away.
The two men were named as fugitive murder suspects on July 23. RCMP said they faced a second-degree murder charge for the death of Dyck and were suspects in the killings of Deese and Fowler.
The manhunt intensified as McLeod and Schmegelsky continued their journey another 1,500 km northeast and international attention to the fugitives started to build.
On July 22, the same SUV that Ste-Croix had pulled out of the mud — that had belonged to Dyck, police confirmed — was found burning in a ditch between Gillam and Fox Lake Cree Nation in northern Manitoba.
The pair apparently fled into the heavily forested, remote bush, likely on foot.
Police rushed to the scene and there was high expectation the search would soon be over.
Gillam, with about 1,200 people, and Fox Lake, with about 200 people, are approximately 1,000 km north of Winnipeg. There is only one road in, and it ends near the two communities, with no easy passage beyond.
YOU HAVE TO KNOW THE LAND ... (OR ELSE) IT WILL EAT YOU UP.
Dense, dangerous wilderness stretches in all directions. They seemed trapped.
But as the search continued without many clues, people started to wonder. Could they have escaped?
Another purported sighting, near the dump outside York Landing, about 100 kilometres from Gillam, shifted the search briefly, but police could not confirm it was the pair.
The RCMP vowed to keep searching even as their search efforts retracted.
“We searched rail lines, hydro corridors, lakes, rivers, vast areas of tundra and muskeg, dense forests and brush,” MacLatchy said on July 31. “We conducted exhaustive searches on foot, with dogs and all-terrain vehicles. We used boats on lakes and searched from the air with drones, helicopters and planes.”
All of the high-tech equipment, however, that uses thermal imaging to detect heat signatures from living creatures, could not spot two dead bodies.