Park Predators - The Travelers

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Young lovers, Chynna Deese and Lucas Fowler set out to visit as many national parks in Canada as they could in the summer of 2019. They didn’t make it far before diabolical predators stopped them in their tracks on Alaska Highway 97. Their murders were just the beginning of a homicidal rampage that would leave five people dead and authorities wondering what was really going on in the mind of two troubled teenage boys.Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://parkpredators.com/the-travelers/ Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the story I'm going to share with you today is one that literally brought me to tears while researching it, mostly because I feel like the victims in this case were doing the same kind of adventuring that my husband and I do on a regular basis. They were just people traveling to and camping near national parks they'd never been to before. The story takes place in British Columbia, Canada in the summer of 2019. It's a case that has multiple victims and more than one perpetrator, all of whom were very different ages. The victims were vacationing in the scenic British Columbia-Alberta border, which is an area BritishColumbia.com refers to as the Greater Yukon Region. The roadways in this area are isolated for long stretches of time, and when I say long stretches, I mean like hundreds and hundreds of miles of nothing but wilderness and rivers.

And just like the mountains in Alberta's Banff and Jasper National Parks spill over into British Columbia, so too did the lives of two teenagers into the unsuspecting paths of three innocent travelers. The crimes that followed set off the largest manhunt in Canadian history that led authorities across four provinces searching for answers that to this day have never come. This is Park Predators. On July 22, 2019, Split Lake First Nation Safety Officer Albert Saunders was driving around on his normal patrol route in Manitoba, Canada, when he spotted a traffic violation. Up ahead of him, he saw a red and gray Dodge pickup truck with a camper shell on the back run a red light at an intersection. Albert quickly flashed his lights and pulled over the truck. Inside were two young men who appeared to be in their late teens. They looked nervous,

really nervous. Albert told them he'd watched them run right through that red light and that they needed to be more careful. The teens just nodded in agreement and apologized. Albert told the Daily Mail, quote, they looked scared. I spoke to the one with the mustache and he just kept saying, sorry. They didn't say where they were going, end quote. A little unsettled by their nervous jitters, Albert said he decided to search the boys' pickup truck and camper shell, but he didn't find anything suspicious. The only items in the back were survival gear and maps, pretty common belongings for people driving in that area

who like to hike or camp in the wilderness. Realizing he had nothing to keep them further, Albert told the boys to be more careful driving and sent them on their way. As he watched them drive off, Albert had no idea he was letting two serial killers go free. Six days before Albert made that traffic stop, two motorists driving on Alaska Highway 97 on the morning of Monday, July 15th, pulled over to check on a blue 1986 Chevrolet van.

The van, which had an Alberta license plate, was parked 20 kilometers or about 12 miles south of a town called Lierde Hot Springs, British Columbia. The blue van got the motorist's attention because the back window was busted out and there was glass all over the shoulder of the road. When they looked inside, they found the bloody bodies of a young man and a young woman. Both appeared to have been shot multiple times. The drivers immediately called 911, and within a matter of minutes, Royal Canadian Mounted Police detectives responded to the scene. The victims' bodies were transported to Abbotsford Regional Hospital, where a medical examiner

performed autopsies. Two days later, the ME positively identified the couple as 24-year-old Chyna Deese from Charlotte, North Carolina, and 23-year-old Lucas Fowler, a local ranch hand who was originally from New South Wales, Australia. RCMP investigators contacted both Chyna and Lucas' families and learned that the couple had just recently set out on a road trip together in British Columbia. Their plan had been to visit as many national parks and forests in Canada as they could before the long winter set in. Their families told police that Lucas had met Chyna in Croatia while she was working at a hostel, and the two had quickly become close, bonding over their love of traveling. They'd started their journey to tour

Canada's national parks as soon as Lucas wrapped up a season of work with Spirit View Ranch in Rycroft, Alberta. Within months of meeting, the couple was inseparable, and their families told the Gazette that after traveling for a year or so, they had plans to get married and live in Australia. In fact, both Chyna and Lucas had joked about how their future kids would need to live in Australia for at least two years in order to make sure they developed Australian accents. Stephen Fowler, Lucas's father, was a chief inspector with the New South Wales police force in Australia. At a press conference in Canada right after his son and China were identified, he told reporters,

quote, I may be an experienced police officer, but today I'm standing here as the father of a murder victim. We're just distraught. Our son Lucas was having the time of his life traveling the world. He met a beautiful young lady and they teamed up. They were a great pair and they fell in love. It's a love story that ended tragically, end quote. It's a love story that ended tragically. End quote. Stephen told Canadian newspapers that Lucas had purchased the blue van with the intent to repurpose it into a camper so that he and Chyna could travel to Alaska and save money on their lodging. In North Carolina, Chyna's mother Sheila told reporters for WSOC News that despite the horror of finding out Chyna was murdered, she found a small comfort knowing that her daughter died next to the man that she loved. After identifying the victims,

detectives put out an all-points bulletin for people to come forward if they'd been driving near Lierd Hot Springs on July 14th or July 15th. Detectives also scoured the area for surveillance video that they thought might help them pinpoint the couple's movements and their last known location before they'd been killed. And as luck would have it, RCMP investigators caught a major break. about a three and a half hour drive from the town of Lierde Hot Springs, captured crystal clear video of Lucas and Chyna pumping gas into their blue van on the afternoon of Saturday, July 13th. In the video, which was posted by the Vancouver Times, you can see the couple embracing one another lovingly while they wait for the tank to fill.

You see Chyna go into the store to pay, and then they pull away out of frame in their van. That was the last footage police were able to find of them, and nowhere in it did it show the couple with anyone else or strangers approaching or following them. Right after police collected that footage, several witnesses came forward and said that they'd seen a young man and woman matching Chyna and Lucas's description sitting in lawn chairs near the hood of a blue van on the afternoon of Sunday, July 14th. The location that these witnesses spotted the van was on Alaska Highway 97, near Lierd Hot Springs, the same location where the couple's bodies were eventually found.

The witnesses said that Lucas and Chyna had the hood of their van propped up, which indicated they were having car issues. The witnesses said they asked Chyna and Lucas if they needed help, but Lucas told them that they were fine and they were just waiting for the van's flooded engine to cool down.

The witnesses said the couple didn't appear to be in any distress. They were just hanging out in their lawn chairs. Another witness came forward and told RCMP detectives that on that same afternoon, they also saw the couple. But that time, they saw a man talking to the pair. This witness described the mystery guy as white with a dark colored beard. That gave officials a pretty good lead on the last person

they thought who'd spoken with Chyna and Lucas. Now, all they needed to do was find this mystery man. So they brought in a sketch artist to draw a picture of the guy and then released it to the public. It made its way into the local and national media outlets, and RCMP detectives fielded tons of tips, but no solid leads materialized right away. After a day, police determined that the sketch of the man was no longer relevant to the investigation, and the person was not a suspect. Four days after China and Lucas's bodies were found,

and police were just into the beginning stages of understanding that investigation, authorities were called to another suspicious incident on nearby Highway 37. This call was about another death and changed everything about the investigation. At 7.30 a.m. on Friday, July 19th, 470 kilometers, or roughly 292 miles west from where Lucas and Chyna's blue van was found, motorists discovered a truck on fire near the side of Alaska Highway 37. This pull-off was in a popular camping and fishing spot called Dees Lake. The truck that was engulfed in flames was a 1993 red and gray Dodge pickup truck with a camper shell on the back of it. About an hour into processing that scene, RCMP officials determined that there

was no evidence indicating that someone had been in the vehicle while it was on fire. A short time later, at 8 30 a.m., a driver raced up to officers working that scene near Dees Lake, and they reported that they'd found a man's body laying in the brush in another pull-off just south of their location. And sure enough, when investigators went to check it out, they found the body of a heavyset white man with a gray beard who appeared to be between 50 and 60 years old. Police told news outlets that they were investigating this man's death as a homicide, but would not release any further details about how he died or who he was. That was because at that point, they didn't know. Police released a sketch of the deceased man to the media with the hopes that someone out there would recognize him, but no one came forward to

identify him, and investigators were forced to wait on an autopsy to get any kind of dental records for comparison. Authorities didn't say it at the time, but according to documents later obtained by the Vancouver Sun, the man on the side of the road had died from multiple injuries. He'd been shot at least one time and stabbed with some sort of large knife, which ultimately led to him bleeding to death there on the side of the road. Evidence like shell casings at the crime scene and slash wounds on his body indicated that he was a victim of a homicide, no doubt. Based on the evidence present at that crime scene, authorities believed 100% that the man had been killed right where he

fell. The spot where he was found was not just a dump site, it was where he'd actually been attacked and killed. Two hours later, while police were still in the middle of that death investigation, two maintenance workers for the highway, who had heard there was a lot of law enforcement activity going on near the highway, came forward to talk to police. The two workers weren't sure if the dead man and the truck fire were connected, but they came forward to report some information to police that they thought might be helpful. The workers told detectives that the night before, around 10.40 p.m., they'd put out a dumpster fire near Dees Lake. Right after getting that tip, police received

another report that a public bathroom facility located super close to where that dumpster fire had been was covered in blood on the inside. Now, that obviously got law enforcement's attention, and when they went to check out the rest stop, detectives found large drops of blood on the floor of a stall and some more drops of blood splashed in a toilet. At that point, police were very suspicious that all four of these scenes, the truck fire, the dead man, the dumpster fire, and the bloody rest stop, were somehow connected. People living where the crimes had happened were starting to get really nervous. living where the crimes had happened, were starting to get really nervous. Rumors started spreading like wildfire on social media that the death of the unknown man and China and Lucas indicated that a serial killer was operating on the highways in British Columbia. People living in the First Nation communities started banding together and dispatching

volunteer groups during the night. They wanted to patrol their neighborhoods and sections of the highway. The chief of First Nation at the time told news reporters that residents were living in fear because nothing like this had happened before in that area. As investigators assembled their case, they ran the insurance information on the burned out red and gray Dodge pickup truck. They uncovered that it belonged to a man named Keith McLeod. Authorities contacted Keith and told him that they'd found his vehicle burned out near Dees Lake. Keith was upset by the news and revealed to officers that he had not been the one driving it. His 19-year-old son, Cam McLeod, had been using it, and it had been several days since he'd heard from his son. Keith explained that Cam had been traveling since July 12th with his best friend,

18-year-old Briar Schmigelski. The young men had been living and working in Port Alberni, British Columbia, a small industrial logging community in the middle of Vancouver Island. Now that investigators had names to work with, they began trying to piece together Cam and Breyer's movements and figure out why their truck had traveled the nearly 1,200 miles from their hometown. According to reporting by the Province and the National Post, Breyer and Cam had been best friends since elementary school. Throughout their young lives, they'd done everything together. According to news reports, the boys were even the same exact weight and height, 6'4", 169 pounds. The only real difference between them was that Cam was described as more social and friendly. Breyer was much more

reserved, quiet, and kept to himself. Authorities learned that after Breyer's parents divorced when he was a child, he ended up living with his grandmother in Port Alberni. When police spoke with his grandmother, she told them that on July 12th, Breyer had just taken off on a spur-of-the-moment trip with Cam. She revealed to detectives that right before leaving, Breyer had been rejected by a girl that he liked. According to the Vancouver Sun,

when authorities interviewed Cam's girlfriend, she told them that the day after the teens left town, she'd received essentially an abrupt breakup text from Cam that said he and Breyer would not be returning. According to the Vancouver Sun, the boys had only contacted their family three times between the time they left and before Cam's

truck was found burned out by the side of the road. RCMP detectives considered the possibility that Cam and Breyer were additional victims themselves. Because of their lack of communication with their families, the police were worried the teens may have come across some bad people on their road trip. That theory started to fade, though, the more investigators learned about the two young men. Breyer's father, Alan, told the Gazette that the two boys had been extremely close their whole lives and remembered them often going into the woods together

to play games they referred to as war. Over the years, he noticed they both became very proficient with wilderness and survival skills. Allen told the newspaper that when Breyer was a young boy, he developed a lot of emotional problems and social anxiety. The Globe and Mail published Breyer's Facebook account name in one of its articles. Linked to his profile was another account called Elusive Gaming. That account portrayed images and topics related to far-right politics, survivalist video games, communism, sexual anime, and fascist propaganda. When investigators dug more into both boys' online profiles, they found pictures of

Breyer wearing military fatigues, holding a rifle, and wearing a red Nazi swastika armband. There were also pictures of him wearing a gas mask and holding a knife with the words blood and honor written on the blade in German. Cam's profiles reflected a lot of the same interests. His posts and pictures expressed he showed interest in communism and the content on the Elusive Gaming website. As police were gathering all of this suspicious information about the teens, it became alarmingly clear that Cam and Breyer might not be helpless victims themselves, but were looking more and more likely to be perpetrators. And from what investigators had already gathered and the pattern of crimes across British Columbia, RCMP believed the teens had no intentions of stopping their rampage.

At that point, RCMP released the boys' pictures to the media, but did not say that they thought Cam and Breyer were suspects. The authorities simply labeled the pair as missing persons. This was strategic on law enforcement's part because they thought if Cam and Breyer saw their faces in the news as suspects, they may go into hiding or worse, ratchet up their killings. And it didn't take long before investigators' worst fears that the young men had purposely chosen to go missing and be violent were confirmed. Detectives began digging into the two teens' bank account history, and what they found did not look good. When RCMP detectives followed the financial movements of Cam and Breyer

and reviewed surveillance video from stores near the murder scenes, they discovered some very interesting clues. According to CBC News, financial records showed that on the day they left Port Alberni, the pair had legally purchased an SKS hunting rifle at a Cabela's retail store. hunting rifle at a Cabela's retail store. Cam's parents told police that Cam owned an older model of that exact same firearm and had taken it with him when he and Breyer left for their trip. The Vancouver Sun reported that on Thursday, July 18, three days after Lucas and Chyna's murder near Lierde Hot Springs, police determined that Breyer had used his debit card at a convenience store between Lierde Hot Springs and Dees Lake. Video from that store showed the boys buying gloves and chocolate bars. Detectives who had investigated the burned-out truck and middle-aged man's death near Dees Lake on Friday, July 19th, found gloves and chocolate bar wrappers at that crime scene.

At the time, though, police didn't release that information to the public. Two days after that, on July 21st, around 7 p.m., a witness called in to police to report that they'd seen two young men at a gas station in northern Saskatchewan. The next day, July 22nd, RCMP officials held a press conference officially confirming that they believed Cam and Breyer were somehow linked to the deaths of Lucas, Chyna, and the man on the side of Highway 37. Detectives wouldn't release why they thought this, but they did issue a stern warning to people across British Columbia and all of Canada. They wanted people to be on the lookout for the two teens, but not take any action to detain them if they spotted them. The boys were considered armed and dangerous.

A few hours after that announcement, the pair was seen at a store in the town of Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, driving a gray 2011 Toyota RAV4. For those of you from Canada or who've traveled through the provinces, you know that these two young men were covering some serious mileage as they moved away from where this all began in western British Columbia all the way to Saskatchewan. It's pretty astonishing just how fast that they were moving. Sometime between July 21st and July 22nd, when police issued that warning to the public, RCMP officials had learned the identity of the dead man whose body had been shot and stabbed near Dees Lake on July 19th. A woman named Helen Dick called RCMP detectives because she'd seen the drawing of the victim on the news and said it looked a lot like her husband, 64-year-old Leonard

Dick. She told authorities that she'd not heard from him since he texted her on the morning of Thursday, July 18th. According to his obituary, Leonard worked as a lecturer for the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He was a botanist who studied ecosystems and plant life. Helen told the police that Leonard spent a lot of time heading up field trips for the university, taking students to various natural areas along the Pacific Northwest. And when he wasn't teaching, he'd go on solo camping trips. She said he often slept in his 2011 Toyota RAV4 on the side of Highway 37. Sometimes he would even set up his tent in the brush

near highway pullouts. A quick comparison of Helen's photos of Leonard confirmed for RCMP detectives that their third murder victim was in fact Leonard Dick. His family told the Vancouver Sun, quote, We are truly heartbroken by the sudden and tragic loss of Len. He was a loving husband and father. His death has created unthinkable grief, end quote. Shortly after confirming Leonard's ID, RCMP detectives issued formal arrest warrants for Cam and Breyer for second-degree murder related to Leonard's death.

Within hours of that happening, an RCMP office in Manitoba got a call that a vehicle was on fire in a remote area of Brush in the northern region of the province. When detectives got on scene, they saw that the burned car was a 2011 Toyota RAV4. Officers didn't find anyone inside or nearby, but they did notice several unspent rounds of rifle ammunition on the ground. Right away, authorities launched a massive ground search for Cam and Breyer, suspecting that they'd set fire to the RAV4 and were now on the run on foot in the remote wilderness. Police ramped up their warning to the public about the two teens. RCMP issued a nationwide manhunt bulletin stating that the pair was, quote, dangerous and if anyone saw them to not approach them and call 911 immediately, end quote. At a press conference on July 23rd, a spokeswoman for RCMP confirmed that investigators

now had enough evidence to prove the two teens were now also the prime suspects in China and Lucas's murders. In just the short period of time they'd been working the case, authorities had been able to compare the shell casings from China and Lucas's scene to the caliber of weapon used to kill Leonard, and they were a match. The bullets had been fired from a 7.62 millimeter SKS rifle. While the manhunt was underway in Manitoba, RCMP called in help from the Canadian Air Force to provide thermal imaging of the vast Manitoba brush. For several days, ground searchers and planes covered more than 11,000 square kilometers of wilderness, but they found no trace of the two teens. Authorities also searched more than 500 homes in the Fox Lake Cree Nation community

just to make sure that Cam and Briar weren't hiding there. While that was happening, a few detectives traveled to Cam and Briar's family's homes and searched their rooms. Inside, they found a bunch of maps of Alaska and Canada and rifle ammunition. On August 1st, 10 days into the ground search for the boys, police located Cam's backpack sitting in a pile of brush. Inside was his wallet, some clothing, and more ammunition. Six days later, on August 7th, search crews found Breyer and Cam dead on the shoreline of Nelson River. They were roughly five miles away from where they'd set the RAV4 on

fire and hundreds of miles from where their killing spree began. It was apparent that both teens had taken their own lives. According to Nine News Australia, next to their bodies, police found a video camera that had belonged to Leonard Dick. Cued up on the screen were six videos in which the pair confessed to all three murders and declared that they'd entered a suicide pact. They expressed no remorse for their crimes and vowed that if they could escape authorities, they would hike to a nearby river, hijack a boat, and sail to Europe or Africa. According to news reports, in some of their videos, the two boys are heard talking to one another about how high the Nelson River was and that they may not be able to cross

it. They both voiced how they were prepared to die and would try and kill more people before police closed in on them and they had to take their own lives. At a press conference two months after their bodies were found, along with Cam and Breyer's families, police announced that there seemed to be no motive for the two teens' actions. Alan Smigelski was in tears talking to reporters about how he didn't want anyone else to feel the way he did as a father. At that same press conference, authorities revealed that Cam had shot Breyer first and then turned the rifle on himself. RCMP officials showed portions of the teen's video clips to their families, but vowed to never release the videos to the public as a precaution. RCMP said it wanted to prevent copycat killers from idolizing Cam and Breyer's crimes.

from idolizing Cam and Breyer's crimes. In the authorities' last press conference about this case, they explained that Lucas and Chyna's deaths, by all accounts, appeared to be completely random killings. The couple was just easy prey because they'd been sitting in their lawn chairs on the side of the road by their van. Detectives said that Leonard Dick's death was also a crime of opportunity, and Breyer and Cam had stolen his car to throw authorities off their trail. They said the teens had torched their red and gray Dodge pickup truck with the camper on the back

in a last-minute attempt to destroy evidence. Authorities believed when Breyer and Cam ran into Leonard near Dee's Lake, he was camping alone and they killed him for the thrill of it and to rob him of his car. The reality of this story is just so sad. There were so many lives affected by what Cam and Breyer did. Even though the teenagers will never face justice in this life, the families of their victims and many people who frequently commute Highway 97 and 37 in Canada are making sure that Chyna, Lucas, and Leonard's memories continue to burn bright and never fade. In July 2020, one year after the murders, a memorial with two crosses,

handwritten notes, flags, and flowers was erected at the spot where Chyna and Lucas were killed. In an interview with CBC News, Sheila Deese said she felt like she'd been living in a movie that she never wanted to be in and would never watch. She expressed immense gratitude for the local people and truck drivers who built the roadside memorial. memorial. In another interview with an online news outlet in Australia, Sheila shared the last text messages she exchanged with her daughter on Saturday, July 13th. Chyna's message included four heart emojis and read, quote, we won't have Wi-Fi for a while. Love you and have a nice weekend. End quote. Sheila went on to explain to the publication that she never had an ounce of worry that Lucas and China would be unsafe in Canada. She said China had already traveled to 13 different countries in her life, and Sheila never expected that that last text message from China would be her last. I think what happened in Canada in 2019 is a reminder to all of us to always be vigilant of strangers on the highway, even if the people in the car next to you have the faces of teenagers. Park Predators is an Audiochuck original podcast.

Research and writing by Delia D'Ambra, with writing assistance from executive producer Ashley Flowers. Sound design by David Flowers. You can find all of the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?