Possible human remains discovered at a Canadian landfill site may be the bodies of two murdered Indigenous women police suspect were disposed by a serial killer, the Manitoba provincial government said Wednesday.
At the Prairie Green landfill, north of Winnipeg, experts “identified potential human remains in the search material,” the government said in a statement.
Federal police and the province’s chief medical examiner are now investigating and seeking to identify the remains as those of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran.
The two women were raped, killed, dismembered and thrown out with the trash, according to court testimony from a trial heard last year.
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Jeremy Skibicki was found guilty in July 2024 of killing four Indigenous women.
The body of another victim, Rebecca Contois, was found in a separate landfill and in a garbage bin, while the remains of a fourth unidentified victim in her 20s is still missing.
Skibicki targeted Indigenous women he met in homeless shelters.
In December 2022, Winnipeg Police Chief Danny Smyth wrote an open letter to Indigenous leaders, vowing to secure a conviction. following correspondence to the AFN, AMC, SCO, MKO and the Long Plain First Nation.
“The investigation involving the murders of Rebecca Contois, Marcedes Myran, Morgan Harris, and Buffalo Woman has been one of the most complex and important homicide investigations during my tenure,” Smith wrote. “I have heard the calls from the families, the Indigenous leadership, and the community. I understand your calls; the pain and sorrow is unimaginable.”
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The case was seen by many in Canada as a symbol of the dangers faced by Indigenous women in a country where they disproportionately fall victim to violence, termed a “genocide” by a national public inquiry in 2019.
Indigenous women represent about one-fifth of all women killed in gender-related homicides in the country — despite comprising just five percent of the female population.
A similar situation exists in the U.S., where Native American women are disproportionately targeted in murders, sexual assaults and other acts of violence, both on reservations and in nearby towns.
There were more than 5,700 reports of missing Native women and girls in 2016, according to the anti-sexual assault organization RAINN, which cites statistics from the National Crime Information Center. The BIA estimated more recently that roughly 4,200 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people remain unsolved.
Earlier this month, the remains of a woman found dead on a reservation in southwestern South Dakota were identified as a Sioux woman who went missing more than a year ago.
