This patch of brush along the Nelson River in Northern Manitoba is where searchers found the remains of Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky on Aug. 7, 2019. Authorities had spent weeks searching for the two murder suspects.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
More below • Documentary: Inside the Manitoba manhunt
At first, police had deep concerns about the welfare of two teens missing last summer amidst the mysterious shooting deaths of three people in northern British Columbia. RCMP Staff Sergeant Janelle Shoihet remembers briefing reporters about their worries.
As she spoke, surveillance photos of childhood best friends Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, in a gas station in Meadow Lake, Sask. – more than 2,000 kilometres southeast from where their families thought they were supposed to be – were landing in the RCMP’s inbox.
Reporters were asking the question: Were the teens victims or suspects? After the news conference, a colleague told Staff Sgt. Shoihet the new evidence suggested the latter. “I thought the floor was going to fall out from under me. I was gobsmacked,” Staff Sgt. Shoihet said in an interview this week. “I did not see it coming.”
The day after Staff Sgt. Shoihet spoke to reporters about fears that the two teens might be victims, she held another news conference to declare them suspects.
“I remember standing up there, and I was gripping the podium when I said that they are no longer missing, but suspects. I knew the gravity of that. The entire investigation was shifting from looking for these missing boys, who we really thought were dead in the woods somewhere, to now, all of sudden, ‘We need everybody to find these boys. Where are they?‘”
Sergeant Janelle Shoihet speaks at a news conference last July 23 about the B.C. fugitives, pictured in police handouts. By this point, the search was closing in on Northern Manitoba.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press/The Canadian Press
July 18, Jade City:
Suspects spotted
July 15, near Liard Hot Springs:
Two bodies found on Alaska Highway
July 21,
Cold Lake:
Suspects spotted
CANADA
ALTA.
SASK.
B.C.
MAN.
July 19, Dease Lake:
A body found two
kilometres from truck
belonging to suspects
July 21,
Meadow Lake:
Suspects spotted
0
300
UNITED STATES
KM
July 24 – Aug. 7, Approximate
location of RCMP search area
along the Nelson River, where
police say they found several
items linked to Schmegelsky
and McLeod
Nelson River
0
10
KM
July 22,
Suspects’
burned-out
vehicle
found
Sundance
Stephens Lake
Gillam
MANITOBA
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN;
OPENSTREETMAP; GOOGLEMAPS
July 18, Jade City:
Suspects spotted
July 15, near Liard Hot Springs:
Two bodies found on Alaska Highway
July 21,
Cold Lake:
Suspects spotted
CANADA
ALTA.
SASK.
B.C.
MAN.
July 19, Dease Lake:
A body found two
kilometres from truck
belonging to suspects
July 21,
Meadow Lake:
Suspects spotted
0
300
UNITED STATES
KM
July 24 – Aug. 7, Approximate
location of RCMP search area along
the Nelson River, where police say
they found several items linked to
Schmegelsky and McLeod
Nelson River
0
10
KM
July 22,
Suspects’
burned-out
vehicle found
280
Sundance
290
Stephens Lake
280
Gillam
MANITOBA
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP; GOOGLEMAPS
July 18, Jade City:
Suspects spotted
July 15, near Liard Hot Springs:
Two bodies found on Alaska Highway
July 21,
Cold Lake:
Suspects spotted
CANADA
DETAIL
ALTA.
SASK.
B.C.
MAN.
July 19, Dease Lake:
A body found two
kilometres from truck
belonging to suspects
July 21,
Meadow Lake:
Suspects spotted
0
300
UNITED STATES
KM
Nelson River
July 24 – Aug. 7, Approximate
location of RCMP search area along
the Nelson River, where police say
they found several items linked to
Schmegelsky and McLeod
0
10
KM
July 22,
Suspects’
burned-out
vehicle found
280
Sundance
290
Stephens Lake
280
Gillam
MANITOBA
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP; GOOGLEMAPS
The manhunt for Mr. McLeod and Mr. Schmegelsky stretched across four provinces and nearly 3,000 kilometres, starting in Port Alberni, B.C., where the boys departed their hometown ostensibly in search of jobs in Yukon. It cost $1.5-million as investigators from the RCMP and the Canadian Armed Forces, as well as local residents, spent 23 days on high alert – from the discovery of the first victim on July 15, 2019, to the discovery on Aug. 7 of the bodies of the two young men, who died in a murder-suicide sometime earlier.
But the crucial question of motive remains unanswered and probably always will, police say.
The three victims in the killings that led to Canada’s longest-running and most far-reaching manhunt hailed from three different countries and were all enjoying the stunning natural beauty of northern B.C. when they were shot.
In the footage from the Meadow Lake gas station, Mr. McLeod and Mr. Schmegelsky were driving an RAV4 SUV registered to Leonard Dyck. The 64-year-old University of British Columbia botanist had been taking a solo grizzly-watching trip up north when he was brutally executed and left in a gravel pullout by the side of the highway outside the small community of Dease Lake, B.C.
The teens instantly became suspects in the deaths of vacationing couple Lucas Fowler, a 23-year-old Australian, and 24-year-old Chynna Deese of the United States. The young lovers, who had met backpacking in Bosnia two years earlier, were found shot beside their van on a highway near Liard Hot Springs Provincial Park, a 21-hour drive north of Vancouver.
A sign welcomes visitors last summer to Port Alberni, Mr. McLeod and Mr. Schmegelsky's hometown, which they left for the final time last July 12.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
A security camera caught them leaving an outdoor recreation store in nearby Nanaimo, where they bought a rifle and ammunition.RCMP
Mr. McLeod and Mr. Schmegelsky had told friends and families they were quitting their gigs working the graveyard shifts at their hometown Walmart to seek opportunities in Yukon.
On July 12, they left Port Alberni and almost immediately stopped in nearby Nanaimo, on the east coast of Vancouver Island, to purchase an SKS semi-automatic rifle and a box of 20 rounds of ammunition using Mr. McLeod’s Possession and Acquisition Licence.
The next day, Mr. McLeod texted his girlfriend, “Seriously sorry but I’m not coming back,” according to police documents released to The Globe and Mail and other media outlets last November. When she called him to ask why he left town without saying goodbye, he hung up the phone, according to police.
Since meeting in elementary school, Mr. McLeod and Mr. Schmegelsky had spent countless hours together shooting Airsoft guns on the McLeod family’s five-acre property near picturesque Sproat Lake and then online, where they teamed up with a handful of local gamers to play first-person shooter and survivalist computer games. It was in this digital realm that the pair’s misanthropic outlook would surface, with Mr. Schmegelsky especially prone to racist and violent ramblings during in-game chats and over social-media posts.
None of the handful of former friends who gamed with them responded to recent requests to comment on the events of last summer. Most in Port Alberni, a town of roughly 20,000 people that still battles a bad reputation for crime and a depressed forestry economy, seem intent on reflecting in private.
Mayor Sharie Minions declined an interview request this week. When The Globe visited the town in September, 2019, Ms. Minions said her community, like many small towns in B.C., has issues with racism and needs to do a better job of ensuring its young people see value in life there after high school and have opportunities that allow them to stay.
Neither Mr. McLeod’s parents nor Mr. Schmegelsky’s mother or grandmother, with whom he was living for the two last years of his life, responded to The Globe’s requests for comment.
The two men are shown in CCTV footage from a store in Meadow Lake, Sask.Manitoba RCMP/Handout via REUTERS/Reuters
After they left Port Alberni last year, the young men continued texting their families until July 17. Thereafter, they turned up on surveillance footage across Western Canada: at a gas store in Fairview, Alta., the gas station in Meadow Lake, Sask.; a McDonald’s in Thompson, Man. On July 22, they bought gas in Split Lake, Man.
And then came Northern Manitoba, where a burned-out vehicle was found in Fox Lake Cree Nation, about 60 kilometres north of Gillam. RCMP concluded it was connected to the suspects. By then, they had been charged with second-degree murder in the death of Mr. Dyck.
As scores of officers plunged into the deep woods looking for the suspects, RCMP Superintendent Kevin Lewis, incident commander for the search, said he was braced for a violent confrontation with the teens.
“Even a bad guy can get lucky with a shot,” Supt. Lewis said in an interview this week. “It is a high risk to search woods for suspects with firearms, even with all of our protective gear.”
But as the manhunt wore on with no luck in locating the teens, the superintendent says it became more plausible that police were searching for bodies, rather than looking for suspects “ready and willing for a gunfight in the woods.”
At top, Manitoba RCMP officers search in the bush along Provincial Road 90 last July 31. Earlier, a local trapper found the suspects' car while it was still on fire, bottom left. A few weeks later, the charred site remained a focal point in the investigation.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail; Courtesy of Billy Beardy/The Globe and Mail
Supt. Lewis, who has been a Mountie for 18 years, said an unforgiving wilderness with dramatic shifts in weather – soaring hot temperatures in the daytime, severe rainstorms and “plumes of mosquitoes” and midges “all over you” – worked in favour of the police because they went in ready to deal with such conditions.
“Being unprepared for the wilderness can really take a toll on an individual, especially if you underestimate it,” he said, noting the dense woods would bedevil efforts to move through them.
Indeed, police concluded, after a week, that the suspects were likely dead. “But you never know,” said the superintendent.
On Aug. 7, police found the bodies of the pair about eight kilometres from the burned-out RAV4.
Trapper Billy Beardy fixes his fishing line along the banks of the Nelson River during the manhunt.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
The turning point in the search came because of the efforts of Billy Beardy, a Cree trapper and construction supervisor, who had been working with the police during the manhunt.
After two weeks, the RCMP were actually winding down their search, certain that Mr. McLeod and Mr. Schmegelsky were dead, but uncertain about finding their remains.
During a last reconnaissance by jet boat on the Nelson River, Mr. Beardy spotted a raven jump up from the bush. He mentioned the sight to an officer behind him and they returned to where the raven had been because Mr. Beardy knew the bird could be scavenging.
That’s when the fugitives’ remains were found. Two semi-automatic rifles located nearby were linked to the three killings in northern B.C. Forensic analysis determined Mr. McLeod had shot Mr. Schmegelsky before turning the gun on himself to fulfill a murder-suicide pact between the two.
Police recovered Mr. Dyck’s stolen camera containing six videos in which the pair took credit for the three murders in B.C., said they were planning to die by suicide and asked to be cremated. According to an expansive RCMP briefing on the case, the pair also talked about a plan to go to Hudson’s Bay, hijack a boat and escape across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe or Africa.
To Supt. Lewis, it was a relief that the story had a definitive ending.
“If we didn’t find them then we would forever have these lingering stories of sightings. Somebody sees them here. Then they’re seen in another place. We play this game with these sightings all over Canada or other countries. This had closure to find them.”
RCMP officers carry metal boxes with the suspects' remains to waiting planes in Gillam, Man., on Aug. 7.Melissa Tait / The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
Since the search ended, Supt. Lewis said tactical details of how the manhunt played out have been circulated among the informal network of RCMP incident commanders in Canada, with conclusions drawn about aiming to work effectively with affected communities, and not being afraid to seek local expertise on such things as wilderness trails and hunting routes.
That said, he added there are limits in how much the manhunt for Mr. McLeod and Mr. Schmegelsky could help prepare for future searches.
“Every situation is so different that you can’t follow a cookie-cutter approach to these incidents because they vary so much from one to another,” he said. “You may get something that may seemingly be similar but, at the end of the day, it’s the information you receive and what’s in front of you.”
Although the manhunt is over, official reviews into the events continue.
The RCMP recently concluded its own investigation into a complaint by Mr. Schmegelsky’s father, Alan, that he was kept in the dark about his son’s initial disappearance; and it found that investigators did nothing wrong. The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP, an independent agency that looks into pubic complaints about conduct of Mounties, is still working on this file.
The police-services branch of the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General is also analyzing the case. Hope Latham, a spokesperson for the ministry, said in a statement that the branch may follow up on reviews of the case or launch an independent study. This depends on the conclusions of the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission as well as the BC Coroners Service, which is investigating the three killings in the province and has not ruled out an inquest to uncover any structural issues that could prevent further such deaths.
Supt. Lewis said that, in retrospect, it was striking how much the killings and the manhunt last summer had drawn the attention of the country. “It wasn’t until I actually left Gillam that I realized ... how big of a story it was, and how impactful to Canadians,” he said.
Documentary: Inside the Manitoba manhunt
It’s been a year since a pair of murder suspects escaped into the wilderness, terrified a nation and mobilized police and Indigenous communities to find them. Globe and Mail journalists were on the scene as the searchers zeroed in on Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod. This is what they saw.
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Ian Bailey
Mike Hager