The man who discovered the battered body of a Quebec hitchhiker in a Savona ditch eight years ago knew the teen was dead when he saw him, a jury heard.

Cheyenne Bird testified Monday at the trial of Brian Townsend, a North Vancouver man accused of beating 15-year-old Vivien Morzuch to death with a baseball bat more than eight years ago.

The Crown has alleged that Morzuch, who was hitch-hiking across Canada, met Townsend at a Revelstoke gas station on July 28, 2000. Two days later, Morzuch's battered body was discovered near the entrance to Savona's Steelhead provincial park.

Bird said he had been out driving around Savona when he stumbled across the teen's body.

"Me and my fiancee at the time were just going for a drive," he said, explaining that the couple had just spent some time at the beach and were about to turn around at the entrance to Steelhead provincial park.

"We did a U-turn to go back, and that's when [we saw it]."

Bird said his then-fiancee was the first to make the grisly discovery.

"She was looking out the window and she noticed a body in the ditch," he said, adding that he then parked and got out of his truck to take a closer look.

"What did you see when you got out of the truck," asked Crown prosecutor Iain Currie.

"A body in a ditch," the man replied.

"How were you able to determine that the person was deceased?" Currie asked.

"It looked like it was," Bird responded. "It was."

Bird said he saw duct tape, over-turned dirt and a stick lying in the vicinity of the body.

In her opening statement, prosecutor Sarah Firestone said one of the Crown's main pieces of evidence will be a piece of bloody duct tape found near the body that was said to contain the thumb print and DNA of Townsend.

Expected to testify later this week are a group of hitch-hikers who travelled with Morzuch in the weeks leading up to his death, and the pathologist who performed the autopsy on the teen's body.

Next week, the Crown expects to hear from a number of police officers who were engaged in an undercover operation that targeted Townsend after he'd been identified as a suspect in the killing in 2005.

Firestone's opening statement described the police investigation as "a piece of theatre."

The trial could last as long as three weeks.