Manitoba RCMP scaling back search for accused killers from B.C.

RCMP teams and the air force are pulling out of northern Manitoba after an intense search netted no new leads. As Stefanie Lasuik reports, RCMP say the nationwide search for the teens wanted in connection to three murders is not over.

GILLAM, Manitoba (NEWS 1130) – It’s been several days since two Vancouver Island men became suspects in the killings of three people in northern B.C., and yet the RCMP still has no idea where the pair is.

Teams in Manitoba have wound down their manhunt for Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod in the small community of York Landing, and they have ended door-to-door checking in Gillam, 90 kilometres away.

Their search so far has come up fruitless, and it appears the RCMP don’t even know if the two, aged 18 and 19, are still in Manitoba.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Assistant Commissioner Jane MacLatchy said officers have searched more than 11,000 square kilometres of wilderness using the best technology available and have found no sign of Schmegelsky and McLeod. 

The RCMP is now scaling back the search in northern Manitoba.

Officers have checked more than 500 homes in Gillam and the Fox Lake Cree Nation searching for the two men, and a checkstop on the only road leading into the small northern community has also been removed.

MacLatchy is emphasizing that the search in the Gillam area is not over, but resources are being re-deployed.

Investigators say they’ve received more than 260 tips in the past seven days, but none have established that Schmegelsky and McLeod have left the Gillam area. It’s possible the suspects may have had some inadvertent help in leaving the area, Mounties say.

Schmegelsky and McLeod are charged with second-degree murder in the death of UBC sessional lecturer Leonard Dyck near Dease Lake in northern B.C. Police also consider them suspects in the fatal shootings of Australian Lucas Fowler and his American girlfriend Chynna Deese, whose bodies were found 470 kilometres away from where Dyck and a burned-out truck and trailer were spotted.

For more on our coverage of the manhunt, click here.

With files from the Canadian Press. 

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