Possible human remains found at Manitoba landfill where search underway for slain First Nations women

February 26, 2025 Canuck

Potential human remains have been found at the Prairie Green landfill north of Winnipeg, according to experts on site who have been searching for the remains of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, two of the four women murdered by a serial killer in 2022.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew told reporters at a news conference the possible remains were found Wednesday morning by a search team, which began the excavation at the landfill in December.

The remains were assessed by a second search team, as per protocol, and then by two forensic anthropologists. Families were then notified of the discovery, and they spent the rest of the day at the landfill, Kinew said.

“We found what we believe is somebody’s loved one,” Kinew said.

“I don’t think any of us will ever forget today.… This has been so public and long in the making. Now we’re at the stage where maybe we’re going to be able to move forward with healing and closure.”

The faces of three First Nations women are pictured side by side. — Left to right: Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and Rebecca Contois. The province says potential human remains have been found at Prairie Green landfill, where workers have been searching for Harris and Myran. (Submitted by Winnipeg Police Service and Darryl Contois)

Manitoba RCMP are now involved in the investigation at the site and identification efforts are underway, Kinew said. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is also involved.

Kinew said there’s still a lot of uncertainty around the discovery.

“We also need to bear in mind which of the two families will receive the news, or potentially another family,” he said.

It will be at least a couple of weeks before the examination process is completed, Kinew said, and in the meantime, he asked the public to respect the identification process.

In a news release announcing the potential discovery, the province also asked for respect for the families’ privacy at this time — a message reiterated by the premier.

“This is about two families who have been going through a grieving process in a very difficult and public way,” Kinew said.

2022 murders

Jeremy Skibicki was convicted in July 2024 of four counts of first-degree murder in the killings of four women.

In addition to Harris and Myran, he was found guilty in the deaths of Rebecca Contois, 24, and a still-unidentified woman who has been given the name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, by community leaders.

It’s believed both Harris, 39, and Myran, 26, were killed in early May 2022.

Investigators believe Contois was the last woman Skibicki killed, on May 14 or 15, 2022. They believe he killed Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe in mid-March of that year.

Contois’s partial remains were found in a garbage bin in Winnipeg in mid-May of that year. More of her remains were found at the city-run Brady Road landfill in June 2022.

On the same morning Contois’s remains were found in the Winnipeg garbage bin, the remains of Harris and Myran, in a dumpster a few blocks away, were picked up by a garbage truck, court heard during Skibicki’s trial last year.

It wasn’t until June 20, 2022, that police realized their remains had been taken to the privately run Prairie Green landfill, in the rural municipality of Rosser, just north of Winnipeg. By then, more than 10,000 more loads of garbage had been dumped there.

In October 2024, excavators started moving material away from an area of the landfill where Harris’s and Myran’s remains were believed to be, after an environmental assessment was completed earlier that year.

The province has previously said the landfill search could continue into early 2026 and would involve sifting through garbage from a total area of about 100 by 200 metres — or about four football fields — to a maximum depth of about 10 metres.

Discovery ‘painful but significant’: AMC

The discovery of potential human remains at the landfill “is a painful but significant moment in our collective fight for justice,” Kyra Wilson, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, said in a news release Wednesday.

“While this discovery brings grief, it also reinforces our commitment to ensuring that no family is left without answers and that justice is served for our stolen sisters,” Wilson’s statement said.

She also said the search is a matter of “human dignity,” affirming that when Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people go missing, they are looked for.

“We do not let their final resting place be a landfill,” Wilson said.

The grand chief also said the search “should never have taken this long” and that the road to the discovery was filled with obstacles that “should have never been placed.”

During the last provincial election, the then governing Progressive Conservatives campaigned on their opposition to a landfill search. In advertisements, the party said “for health and safety reasons, the answer on the landfill dig just has to be no.”

Kinew’s NDP, which won the October 2023 election, promised during the campaign to launch a search.

Wilson said the discovery proves that justice is possible when there is political will and commitment.

Kinew said the search was paused while the potential human remains were assessed, but it will resume on Thursday.

“I hope there is closure coming for one family, but we have to keep working for the other family,” he said.

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Possible human remains found at Manitoba landfill where search underway for slain First Nations women

2022 murders

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