HIGHWAY OF TEARS

Audrey Auger will always remember her daughter’s last words. “She waved at me, blew a kiss and said: ‘I’ll be back mom, don’t worry. I’ll phone you later.’ But I never heard from her again.

“From that night on, I just didn’t want to live. I felt like a failure – I wasn’t able to protect her.”

The body of her 14-year-old daughter Aielah Saric was found last year, a few months after she disappeared.

Tom Chipman is still looking for his 22-year-old daughter Tamara, who went missing in 2005.

Both grieving parents have walked the same road looking for their daughters – the road now known as the Highway of Tears.

“We’re up at six every morning, and we quit at dusk,” said the shattered dad. “I don’t know how long we can keep going. I guess until the cold weather shuts us down.”

Tamara vanished on an isolated strip of blacktop that has become the world’s most dangerous road for women.

Fading posters of missing females are tacked to utility posts along desolate Highway 16 in Canada, which winds for 450 miles from the Rockies to the Pacific.

Along this remote highway, 34 women, mostly in their teens and 20s, have been found murdered in the past 30 years. Dozens more have disappeared.

“Every time we hear of someone else missing, it just brings us so much sorrow because we know what the families are going through,” says Matilda Wilson, whose 14-year-old daughter Ramona fell victim to the highway 10 years ago.

Her body was eventually found by the roadside. She’d been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Road signs caution young women not to hitchhike and starkly warn: “Killer on the Loose!”

Police suspect they could be looking for one of the world’s worst serial killers – perhaps more than one.