His family says he was a hockey player. Her neighbours said she was friendly and well-liked by everyone.
Ryan Sawchuk and Alicia Bateman, both age 28, were planning a Sept. 6 wedding.
But that came to an end when the couple was discovered dead in Bateman’s Orleans home on the weekend.
As neighbours walked their dogs and tended to their yards yesterday, police investigators remained on scene at 302 Cote Royale Crescent, seeking clues to explain an apparent murder-suicide in the Orleans home.
Neighbours yesterday remembered Alicia Bateman as a cordial woman who loved to jog and walk her dog — just hours after major crime investigators pulled her body from her Orleans home.
Neighbour Cynthia Harps, who lives across the street, last saw Bateman on Saturday afternoon as both arrived home shortly after 3 p.m. — just hours before police responding to an emergency call at the address discovered the bodies of a woman and a man inside the home, shortly after 5 p.m.
“She was just getting dropped off. She said ‘Hi’ to my daughter. The next thing I know we saw cop cars and ambulances,” Harps said. “Then the garage door opened and they kind of dragged her out.”
Shortly before midnight a man’s body was also removed from the house. None of the neighbours reported knowing a man who lived at the address.
Police yesterday identified the deceased male as Ryan Sawchuk, of Calgary.
Reached by Metro yesterday in Calgary, Sawchuk’s grandmother, Mary Sawchuk, said that Bateman and Sawchuk made a good couple.
“He was madly in love with her,” said the Calgary resident. “He adored her.”
The couple had recently lived apart, she said. While Bateman moved to Ottawa for work, Sawchuk, a University of Ottawa grad, lived in Calgary, where he worked for Mazda.
According to residents of the street, Bateman was a “petite” woman with fair hair, who was often spotted out jogging or walking her dog. But neighbours knew her only to wave at her, they said.
Harps’ husband, Michael, occasionally helped clear the woman’s driveway of snow in the winter. “She’d leave in the morning and come back the same time every night,” Cynthia Harps said. “We’d say ‘Hi’ when we saw each other outside, but that’s about it.”
Yesterday, police tape blocked off a lawn that had not been recently cut.
– tim.wieclawski@metronews.ca
