A landfill, four victims and a trial with questions to answer

Jordan: A quick warning before we begin this episode contains descriptions of domestic violence and murder. You probably know this story as the case that involves the Winnipeg Landfill. That is the part that made national headlines sparked protests and blockades and might even have decided an election. But at the heart of this case, are the women, four of them all allegedly murdered by the same man, a man who goes to trial this month in Manitoba. As that trial looms, a number of questions remain. How did the alleged killer find his victims? Why considering his history of violence, was he free to find them in the first place? And after a winning campaign that was based in part on a promise to search the landfill for the remains of the victims, why hasn’t that search begun? How did this happen? How easily could it have been prevented? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Rachel Browne is an investigative journalist as well as a documentary producer. She investigated this story in Maclean’s Magazine. Hey Rachel.

Rachel Browne: Hey Jordan.

Jordan: I’m hoping maybe we can start as we like to do in cases like this with a little bit about the victims. This is a really tough case. It’s really impacted the community. Who were they?

Rachel Browne: So the victims in this case are four indigenous women who were, as far as we can tell, living in the downtown Winnipeg area before they went missing and were eventually murdered. As far as we know, these women were struggling with substance use and mental health issues, and they were using various shelters and social services downtown as well. Most of them have had experiences with the child welfare system in Manitoba growing up, or they were struggling with having their own children taken away from them by the province as well. The women are Rebecca Contois, who was a 24-year-old mother of one daughter and she belonged to Crane River First Nation. There’s Marcedes Myran, who was 26 year olds, a mother of two children, and there was Morgan Harris as well, who was a 39-year-old mother of five children. This includes Cambria Harris, who has since become a very outspoken advocate for her mother’s case. And those are the other women. And the fourth woman is believed to have been in her mid twenties when she died. And her identity is still unknown to this day, and she’s been given the honorary name, Buffalo Woman by the indigenous community.

Jordan: You mentioned these women were murdered. There is a lot of unknowns regarding this case, despite the fact that it’s just about to go to trial. What do we know for sure about what happened to them?

Rachel Browne: Yeah, there’s a lot of details around the intricacies of the investigation and the intricacies and details that allegedly connect the killer with these women in sort of the final days of their life. Police have been very tightlipped about this. There’s been some details that have been released at court or for the past couple of months, but those details are all under a publication ban at the moment. But what we do know is that these women started to go missing in the winter in the early months of 2022, and by mid-May of 2022 is when the partial remains of one of the women was found in a dumpster near a man named Jeremy Skibicki’s apartment building. And that search, that discovery eventually led police to charge Skibicki with first degree murder in the death of Rebecca Contois, and in many months went by and then they eventually charged him with first degree murder in three more cases.

Jordan: You mentioned those several months between when the remains were found and when the charges were laid. Can you walk us through the circumstances around the search for these women?

Rachel Browne: Yeah. So as I mentioned in mid-May is when Jeremy Skibicki was formally charged with first degree murder. In the case of Rebecca Contois and Police at the time, they were able to use evidence that was found in searching the garbage bins near his apartment and other evidence was able to help them lay that first degree murder charge. And they also connected those remains to the Brady Landfill. They were able to find more remains there that connected to Rebecca Contois. I mean, it’s very likely because the remains were found in a dumpster that they said, okay, we need to search the landfill. And they did in that case. And so over the next few weeks into June is when that was all confirmed. And again, at this time, police had said that they believed that there were more victims potentially, but they just hadn’t announced any further charges or potential missing or murdered women at that point. So over the summer, this was unbeknownst to the public at the time, the police had suspected that the remains of Marcedes, Myron, and Morgan Harris were very likely in another landfill outside of Winnipeg called the Prairie Green Landfill. Again, the families, the public had no idea that this was sort of a notion that was being explored by the police. And it wasn’t until December of that year that police announced the charges in the murders of Marcedes, Myron and Morgan Harris informing the family, informing the public that charges had been laid in their cases as well as Buffalo women. And that is when the family started to call for the search to be done. There hadn’t been another search for the remains of those women. And so that’s when the calls began for the police to search the Prairie Green Landfill.

Jordan: We’ll talk in a moment about the fight over that search, which really went all the way to the top of the ballot in a provincial election. But first you mentioned his arrest and the suspicion that there are more victims quickly. Who is Jeremy Skibicki? What do we know about him?

Rachel Browne: So Jeremy Skibicki, at the time of his arrest was 35 years old. He had been renting the apartment that I mentioned in the North Kildonan neighborhood about 20 minutes or so by bus from downtown Winnipeg. And my reporting suggests that he was born and raised in Winnipeg, and after his arrest, acquaintances and people who kind of were in his orbit a little bit in the years and months before his arrest suggested that he was someone who presented as homeless, someone who frequented homeless shelters for meals and other types of services. People just kind of assumed that he was unhoused and he was also known to be kind of hanging around these places and would sometimes offer women drugs and offer them a warm place to sleep or shower overnight. And so he kind of had that reputation a little bit in the lead up to his arrest. Friends and former girlfriends of his that I spoke to described him as very religious devoutly Christian, very hardcore Christian. And he also was apparently a self-described white supremacist as well. He espoused white supremacist ideology, posting about it on Facebook. And he also posted quite a bit about denying the existence of residential schools and denying the existence of the mass graves that had recently been discovered around some of these residential schools as well.

Jordan: This could take a long time. I know because you’ve done such a thorough job here, but as we’re talking about him, could you maybe sum up, I guess, some of his past experiences with women and the justice system to give us a sense, I guess, of just how many times what ended up happening might have been prevented?

Rachel Browne: Yeah. Court records and people I spoke to who had violent encounters with Skibicki suggest that there were many opportunities for Skibicki to be held accountable for his increasingly violent behavior, especially towards women over the years. But even before he started entering the criminal justice system for acts of violence, there are high school classmates of his who spoke to the Winnipeg Free Press who said that he exhibited aggressive and violent tendencies towards women. Even then one woman says that he threw her across the room during a gathering at one of the student’s house one day, and then he kind of went on to be charged with things like forgery, nonviolent crimes starting around 2008. And by his mid twenties is when he starts to enter the criminal justice system facing accusations and eventually convictions of violent behavior towards women. There was a fiance of his that he was living with in 2015 who accused him of being very physically violent with her threatening her life. She was pregnant, so he was threatening her life as well as the life of her unborn child at the time. And he ended up being charged with assault in her case and was sentenced to two years of probation. They ended up kind of getting back together or living together again, and the abuse continued and she applied for a court ordered protection order, kind of like a restraining order against him, and that was denied. And so that’s sort of one of the major instances we see where these women try to stop him in his tracks, stop the violence as it continues to escalate. And he in that case, is pretty much left off the hook. And in years after that, he was dating another woman, someone he met at the SLO mission, a shelter in downtown Winnipeg. They got married quite quickly and their relationship quickly turned violent, physically violent, sexually violent. And like the woman a few years before, this woman who is now his wife, also sought a protection order and also sought criminal charges against him as well. Those criminal charges ended up being stayed because of issues associated with this woman’s memory loss, which were ironically exacerbated. She says due to the physical violence that he perpetrated against her, and then the protection order that she sought was put in place, but none of these things were enough to really stop. Skibicki, this woman in this case even said she warned the court if he is not stopped, he’s going to go on to kill someone.

Jordan: What do police say or what have they said about when this behavior moved from violence and aggression and drugs to murder?

Rachel Browne: What we do know is just based on the timeline that is public for years, Skibicki was accused or convicted of acts of violence against women with whom he was in relationships. And so we know from his mid twenties onward is when he started to become very physically violent and aggressive towards women. And then he ends up being charged with murder in May of 2022, just a few months after he was acquitted of those assault charges that his former wife tried to pursue against him. And police have said that they believe the first woman that he allegedly killed was killed in March of 2022.

Jordan: What do we know, and I know that there are details that you’ll say we expect to hear at trial, but what do we know about how he met his victims and how they’re connected to one another?

Rachel Browne: Again, yeah, like you said, we just don’t know too much about this, and there’s not a lot that can be publicly said at this point, but I think we can surmise that because Skibicki was frequenting these homeless shelters and other social services downtown Winnipeg, and these women, the victims also were known to go to these social services as well. I think we can surmise that they perhaps met each other in those settings. When I spoke to Skibicki’s ex-wife who he met at the solo mission, she kind of believes that it’s in one of those types of settings is where he would’ve met these women.

Jordan: There was a huge fight even after the charges were laid, as you mentioned over the search for remains at the landfill. Can you walk us through that, I guess, all the way to, as I mentioned, the provincial election and what happened there?

Rachel Browne: Yes. So with the land searches, this became a really important issue for the family members of the victims, for advocates as well. Having these searches in order to recover the remains of these women is extremely important for their closure is extremely important for their pursuit of justice for their loved ones. And so after Skibicki became an alleged serial killer, when he’s charged with these multiple counts of first degree murder in 2022 in December, that’s when Cambria Harris, in particular, the daughter of Morgan Harris and her family began to call for the search to happen of the Prairie Green Landfill, which hasn’t happened because it’s believed that’s where the remains of Marcedes Myran and Cambria’s mother Morgan Harris are police have declined to search because they say it’s too expensive, it’s too difficult, and now so much time has passed, and day by day a prospective search becomes that much more difficult. And these calls for the search and for the funding to support it quickly became politicized. And the refusal to search and the call to search the landfills became an election issue. As you said, in Manitoba last fall, especially the incumbent premier Heather Stevenson, who was the leader of the progressive conservatives, was vehemently opposed the landfill search. And she made that a central feature of her campaign. Actually, if you drove through Winnipeg, you could see billboards, bus stop ads and signs that were paid for by the progressive conservatives reading things like stand firm for health and safety reasons. The answer on the landfill search just has to be no. So if you think about people like Cambria Harris, and the loved ones of these victims to drive through their hometown and see these types of signs, it really must’ve just been extremely difficult and disheartening to see your government put out that kind of messaging as you’re trying to fight for justice for your family. And Manitobans overall at this time during the election were seemingly split on the issue, but it was really the NDP led by Wab Kinew who vowed to search the landfill if elected and the NDP ended up winning. It was a very big deal. And so that really makes the search that much more likely. There’s still issues to be dealt with in terms of the cost and the feasibility of the search. Again, day by day it becomes that much more difficult. But just a couple of weeks ago, the province and the federal government have committed $40 million to search it. So it seems likely, but we just don’t have a timeline or specifics on when the search will happen.

Jordan: The trial is about to start, when exactly does it start, and what does it mean for the trial that they are beginning it with this landfill search still not completed and without a lot of the remains they’re looking for.

Rachel Browne: So the last I heard, the jury trial is supposed to begin this month, so April of 2024, I think there’s a sense that it could be pushed back due to some pretrial motions and things that still need to be dealt with, but it’s supposed to happen very soon. And like you said, with the landfill search still to come, that may present some new pieces of evidence, new avenues as it pertains to the trial, both for the defense and the prosecution. But I think what we know is that the police had enough evidence to lay the charges in the first place. There are other types of evidence that are likely at play when it comes to the charges that Skibicki, who I should say, has pleaded not guilty to all the charges is facing. This isn’t the first case where there’s been a lack of physical evidence or remains when it comes to the victims. And I think there’s other types of evidence, potentially photo evidence, video evidence, I’m sort of speculating here, but there’s other types of evidence that will likely be at play when it comes to the charges that Skibicki is facing. And one thing I did want to note is in February, actually it was interesting, there was an online survey and a tech survey as well that was released in Manitoba by Legal Aid, Manitoba, which is where Skibicki’s lawyers work, and this might provide some potential insights for the defense strategy. So the poll that was released asked about three criminal defenses, one, not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder. Number two, problematic, DNA evidence, and number three, self-defense. So the survey was asking people what they thought about these three potential criminal defenses in their view of each one as it pertains to a not guilty verdict for Skibicki. So again, until the trial begins, we won’t know exactly how the defense is going to use or not use certain types of evidence. But I found that that survey that was released to be kind of interesting in a little bit of a look at what perhaps might come about during the trial.

Jordan: What are you hoping we learn more about when this case actually gets into a courtroom? What do we not know yet that we need to,

Rachel Browne: I think the public and the family members of the victims will be eager to know what happened exactly to these women and how they may have fallen through the cracks of the system, various systems over the years leading up to their disappearance and their murders. I think and hope that the trial shines light on that so that families can get the answers that they need and that there can be perhaps some critical examination of what went on at these systems that perhaps contributed to the vulnerability of these women. And outside of the trial. I know that advocates and family members will continue to raise awareness about the ongoing issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, which continues to be a really serious issue, not just a Winnipeg, but across Canada as well.

Jordan: Rachel, thank you for explaining this to us, walking us through it, and bringing us up to date. And thanks for all your work you’ve done on this case.

Rachel Browne: Thanks, Jordan. Really appreciate it.

Jordan: Rachel Browne covering this story for Maclean’s. That was The Big Story. For more from us, you can head to The Big Story podcast.ca. If you or somebody you know is at risk of domestic violence, you can find resources and safety@sheltersafe.ca. You can get in touch with us to offer feedback on this episode or any other by emailing us hello at The Big Story podcast. Do ca or by calling us at 4 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5 and leaving a voicemail. The Big Story is in every single podcast player, and as most of you probably all of you know by now, you can get it on a smart speaker, whether that’s in your kitchen, your bedroom, or your car, just ask it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.