Potential human remains have been found at the Prairie Green landfill, according to experts on site, the province of Manitoba said in a news release Wednesday.
A search for the remains of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran officially started in December. They are two of the four women murdered by serial killer Jeremy Skibicki in Winnipeg in 2022.
Manitoba RCMP are now involved in the investigation at the site and identification efforts are underway, the province said Wednesday. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is also involved.
Harris, 39, and Myran, 26, are assumed to have been dumped at the privately run Prairie Green, in the rural municipality of Rosser, north of Winnipeg. Both women were from Long Plain First Nation.
Their families have been notified of the development and have visited the site, the province said, and further information will be provided as facts are confirmed in the investigation.
The province has also asked for respect for the families’ privacy at this time.
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.
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, and killed Harris on May 1 and Myran on May 4.
During Skibicki’s trial, court heard that when Contois’s remains were found in a garbage bin, Harris’s and Myran’s remains were in a dumpster just a few blocks away and about to be taken to a landfill that same morning.
It wasn’t until June 20, 2022, that police realized Harris’s and Myran’s remains had been taken to Prairie Green, and by then, more than 10,000 more loads of garbage had been dumped there.
In October 2024, excavators started moving material away from a landfill area where Harris’s and Myran’s remains were believed to be, after an environmental assessment was completed earlier in 2024.
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.”
The Progressive Conservatives campaigned on their opposition to the landfill search during the last provincial election. In advertisements, the party said “for health and safety reasons, the answer on the landfill dig just has to be no.”
Wilson said the discovery proves that justice is possible when there is political will and commitment.
