The young couple found murdered on a Canada roadway met their demise near a thoroughfare so notorious for bloodshed that it became known as the “Highway of Tears.”

Chynna Deese, 24, of Charlotte, North Carolina, and her beau, Lucas Robertson Fowler, 23, of Sydney, Australia, were found shot dead July 15 on the side of a remote highway in British Columbia, 12 miles south of Lilard Hot Springs, a popular tourist destination.

The pair was discovered close to the infamous roadway, which is a 450-mile stretch of Highway 16, which itself is a part of the Trans-Canada Highway system.

Over the past 40 years, authorities say, 18 women and girls have disappeared or been found murdered there. Locals suspect the death toll is higher.

“People know that their sisters and daughters are at risk if they go near this highway and perhaps wind up hitchhiking for an emergency reason,” investigative journalist Bob Friel, who had traveled the Highway of Tears, told CBS. “The number of victims varies with who you talk to. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police force says that there’s 18 victims. But if you talk to the local people, they believe the number is 33, 43, perhaps even more.”

Most of the victims were indigenous women — sparking political turmoil in British Columbia, the New York Times reported.

Cody Legebokoff, one of Canada’s youngest serial killers, was convicted in 2014 of killing four women near the Highway of Tears, according to the report. He was 24 at the time.

The remote thoroughfare cuts British Columbia in half, passing through thick forests — marked with the occasional “Moose Crossing” sign — as well as towns and impoverished Indian reserves as it approaches the Pacific Ocean, according to the report.

At the time, a large yellow billboard on the roadway read, “Girls Don’t Hitchhike on the Highway of Tears. Killer on the Loose!”

Local authorities have long been investigating the unsolved murders along the stretch — and in 2005 launched a program called Project E-Pana that would help them “determine if a serial killer, or killers, is responsible for murdering young women traveling along major highways in BC.”

The project includes 13 homicide investigations and five missing people investigations, according to its website.

Police could not make any immediate connections to the highway’s past, and ongoing cases, CBS News reported.

“At this point we have nothing to indicate that their deaths are linked to any other active and ongoing investigations,” Janelle Shoihet of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the network. “It’s not yet clear whether Lucas and Chynna were targeted, or if this was an opportunity, a crime of opportunity.”

A police official said Tuesday that “multiple sources” have spoken of a potential link between Deese and Fowler’s deaths and a suspect, wanted for the murder of an elderly Texas man, who crossed into Canada late last month.

Authorities were also considering whether the couple’s deaths were connected to the disappearance of Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, who were believed to have been driving a vehicle that was found in flames about 310 miles from where the couple was murdered.

Another man’s dead body was discovered just over a mile from the burning car.