In the autumn of 1981, Roswitha Fuchsbichler was a 13-year-old girl with her whole life ahead of her in Prince George, British Columbia. The night of Saturday, November 14, found her at a house party in the city's foothills area. In the early morning hours, around 2 a.m., she spoke to a friend for the last time before leaving the party. Roswitha intended to meet an older man, but she never made it.
Instead, she began to hitchhike, a common but perilous way to travel along the remote highways of the region.
Later that day, at 6:45 p.m., Roswitha’s family reported her missing. A week of anxious searching passed with no sign of the young teenager. The devastating discovery was made on November 21, when two joggers stumbled upon her body in a wooded area behind the Hart Highway, about 20 kilometers from where the party had taken place. She had been brutally killed, her body disrobed and mutilated. The cause of death was determined to be a single, fatal stab wound to the heart.
Investigators immediately saw similarities between Roswitha’s murder and the killing of 36-year-old Jean Mary Kovacs just one month prior, but they lacked the physical evidence to definitively link the two cases. The investigation was extensive, with thousands of people questioned, but for years, Roswitha’s murder remained unsolved, a cold case that was part of a terrifying string of disappearances and homicides along the stretch of Highway 16 that would come to be known as the Highway of Tears.
The break in the case finally came years later, not from a piece of evidence, but from a person. In late 1985, the former girlfriend of a man named Edward Dennis Isaac moved away from Prince George. Feeling safe from his threats, she went to the police and shared a horrifying secret she had kept for years. Based on her testimony, police arrested Isaac on February 7, 1986. Under interrogation, Isaac confessed to the 1982 murder of 15-year-old Nina Marie Joseph. His confessions didn't stop there.
Isaac also admitted to killing Roswitha Fuchsbichler. He told investigators he had picked her up as she was hitchhiking. He strangled her and then, in a chillingly detached admission, said he stabbed her in the heart simply "to see what it felt like." He also confessed to the murder of Jean Mary Kovacs. Isaac was one of three serial killers known to have operated along the Highway of Tears during that era, preying on vulnerable women and girls.
For the killing of Roswitha, Edward Dennis Isaac pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1987 after a psychiatric evaluation found him fit to stand trial. He also pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Jean Kovacs and was convicted of manslaughter for the death of Nina Marie Joseph. In the end, he was given three life sentences with the possibility of parole after 15 years. The resolution of the case brought a name and a measure of justice to the person responsible for ending three lives, but it could never fill the void left in the families of his victims. The Fuchsbichler family would endure further tragedy, with the passing of Roswitha's sister Carmen and, in 2014, her mother, Maria.
