On the morning of May 16, 2022, officers in Winnipeg found part of a woman's body in a garbage bin in a back lane behind an apartment building in North Kildonan, a residential district in the city's north-east. She was Rebecca Contois, twenty-four. Within days the man who lived in the building, Jeremy Anthony Micheal Skibicki, thirty-five, had told detectives that she was the last of four women he had killed since March, and the case turned into a question the city and then the province would argue over for three years: whether to dig through a landfill to bring the other women home.
All four came from Manitoba First Nations, and all four were, at the time, moving between Winnipeg's homeless shelters. The trial would hear that Skibicki looked for women there, brought them back to his apartment, sexually assaulted and killed them, dismembered the bodies and put the remains out with the household refuse. The dates below are the ones police gave as the dates on or around which each woman died.
Ashlee Christine Shingoose, thirty, of St. Theresa Point Anisininew Nation, was the first, killed in mid-March 2022. For almost three years nobody could say who she was. Skibicki described her to police but could not name her; the name he offered belonged to a woman later found alive. Indigenous elders gave the unknown victim the name Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe, Buffalo Woman, and a buffalo headdress sat on the prosecution table through the trial in her place. The one trace investigators held was DNA on a jacket they believed she had worn, recovered after Skibicki tried to sell it online. It matched nobody, including her own family, whose samples were taken in early 2023; police later concluded the DNA belonged to someone else. Her parents went on telling police they believed she was the woman in the case. In December 2024 detectives interviewed Skibicki again in prison, and the new information he gave sent them to a pair of pants that had never been tested. DNA from them confirmed her identity, and on March 26, 2025 police announced it. At the news conference, at her father's request over the phone from St. Theresa Point, Premier Wab Kinew sang a traditional song for her.
Morgan Beatrice Harris, thirty-nine, of Long Plain First Nation, was a mother of five and a grandmother. She was last seen near Main Street and Henry Avenue, north of downtown, on May 1, 2022, and died on or about that day. Her daughter Cambria Harris became one of the most public voices in the fight that followed.
Marcedes Myran, twenty-six, also from Long Plain, died on or about May 4. Her grandmother, Donna Bartlett, remembered her as happy, smiley and trusting.
Rebecca Contois, of O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation, also called Crane River, was the mother of one child. She was killed on May 14 or 15, and it was the discovery of her remains two days later that ended it.
Police moved quickly once the bin had been found. They secured the city-run Brady Road landfill in the south end, where that building's refuse was taken. The same day, they later said, the remains of Harris and Myran, left in a different dumpster, were carried to the privately operated Prairie Green landfill north of the city. On May 18 Skibicki was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in Contois's death, and a warrant was executed at his apartment. The next day police confirmed the remains in the bin were hers, and a search of Brady Road that began on June 2 recovered more of them.
In the interviews that followed his arrest, Skibicki admitted killing Contois and three other women, a confession detectives had not expected. He described the killings as racially motivated and spoke of white supremacist beliefs; posts on a Facebook page linked to him, some of them violent and racist, were later read in court. Reporting on the case described a history of domestic violence. On December 1, 2022 he was charged with three more counts of first-degree murder, for Harris, Myran and the woman then known only as Buffalo Woman. Police said at the time that there could be other victims. None has been identified.
The refusal to search Prairie Green became the public center of the case. Police said that some ten thousand loads of refuse had been dumped and compacted with clay over the cell since May 2022, and that the conditions made a search too dangerous; they declined to carry one out. Protests followed in Winnipeg and other cities. By the provincial election of 2023 a landfill had become a campaign issue, with the governing Progressive Conservatives running advertisements against a search and the New Democrats under Kinew promising one. Kinew won. The province gave environmental approval on June 11, 2024, and excavation began on December 2, 2024. On February 26, 2025 it announced that possible human remains had been found; they were identified as Harris on March 7 and Myran on March 17. The search closed that summer with private ceremonies for both families, at a cost Kinew put at about $18 million, a fraction of the early estimates.
Skibicki pleaded not guilty to all four counts, and shortly before trial his lawyers chose to be heard by a judge alone. Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Manitoba Court of King's Bench sat through the evidence in the spring of 2024. The defense did not dispute that Skibicki had killed the women. Its case was that he was not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder. On July 11, 2024 Joyal rejected that argument count by count and convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder, and the courtroom, full of the women's families and supporters, broke into cheers.
On August 28, 2024 he received the sentence the law required: four concurrent life terms with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years. Relatives read statements to the court. Morgan Harris's daughter Elle said she could not condense the loss of her mother into words on a page. Skibicki was thirty-seven.
Ashlee Shingoose's remains are believed to be at Brady Road. Police traced her body to a garbage bin behind a business on Henderson Highway, in North Kildonan, and from there to the landfill in March 2022. The province began its search on December 1, 2025, bringing the first truckload of debris down the hill to a sorting facility that morning, and has said the work could take a year. In January and March 2026 Kinew reported that the material being recovered matched both the date range and the collection routes the searchers were looking for. On April 30, 2026 the province said it had decommissioned the Prairie Green site and that the search for Shingoose was continuing. It has said that when that search is finished it will look in the same landfill for Tanya Nepinak, missing since 2011 and believed by police to have been killed by a different man.