A road worker in northern B.C. claims she saw a bearded man who appeared to be arguing with Lucas Fowler and Chynna Deese on a remote stretch of the Alaska Highway just hours before the couple was found dead.
"To me he kind of looked frustrated or something," Alandra Hull told Nine News Australia about the Sunday evening encounter. “Like he was just kind of standing like this and just looking at them.”
She said the couple looked bothered by the man and the interaction made her uneasy.
“If you just get a bad feeling, and that’s what I had, you just don’t stop,” said Hull.
Another highway worker, Trevor Pierre, saw Deese and Fowler’s bodies early Monday morning on the Alaska Highway, about 20 kilometres south of Liard Hot Springs.
“In the ditch was the lady first, young lady, and maybe five metres behind was the gentleman,” said Pierre. “He had no shoes, the young lady had one.”
RCMP have not said how Deese and Fowler died, but Pierre describes a gruesome crime scene.
“I don’t know how anybody could live with themselves after doing what I saw,” he said.
Fowler, a 23-year-old Australian, had been living in B.C. since February and working at Spirit View Ranch near Hudson’s Hope.
“He became part of our family and was a good employee. He had a good heart,” said Christoph Weder, owner of the ranch.
Weder says Fowler was quite mechanically inclined and fixed up a blue 1986 Chevy van for a planned road trip to Alaska with Deese, his American girlfriend of two years, who had just arrived in B.C. from North Carolina.
Witnesses report the van had broken down Sunday on the side of the road but Fowler and Deese declined help because they had already diagnosed the problem and were confident they could get the vehicle going again.
“They both had very good hearts and souls. There wasn’t a bad bone in either one of them,” Weder said. “They wouldn’t hurt a fly. So it’s quite the shock.”
RCMP visited the ranch as part of their investigation into who killed Deese and Fowler.
Hull says police have asked her to work with a composite artist to create a sketch of the man she saw speaking with the couple Sunday evening.