Manitoba police have identified parts of the human remains found in a search of a landfill near Winnipeg last month as belonging to Morgan Beatrice Harris, one of the four Indigenous victims of the serial killer, authorities said Friday.
Harris and three other women, all from the Winnipeg area, were killed between March and May 2022. Harris, a member of Long Plain First Nation, had 39 members.
Until Friday, only one woman, Rebecca Comtois, 24-year-old ruins had been discovered and identified.
Jeremy Anthony Michael Skivicki was convicted of murder late last year and was sentenced to life in prison without a chance to be parole for 25 years. He expressed his far right support on social media, filling his Facebook page with white supremacist, misogynist and anti-Semitic comments.
The other two victims were 26-year-old Marcedes Milan and an unidentified woman the First Nations elders call Mashkod Bizikikwe, or Buffalo women.
The question of whether to search for the Prairie Green Reclaimed Land near Winnipeg for the remains became a political issue in the 2023 state election. The defeated progressive conservatives ran campaign ads and cited signs against the search, citing that they had a small cost, risk to investigators and that the party had little chance of finding something.
The Indigenous group pointed to a contrast with the case of British Columbia serial killer Robert Picton.
In 2002, Royal Canadian Police transformed his pig farm near Port Coquitram, British Columbia into Canada's largest crime scene investigation site. Pickun was eventually convicted of killing six women, but he boasted of killing dozens more.
The identification of Harris' body was announced in a statement by the New Democrats government on Friday. This was promised during a campaign to search for landfills. The party's leader was Wab Kinew, the first indigenous people to serve as local prime minister.
“Take your family to heart tonight. I trust this process, so move forward every day,” Harris' daughter, Cabria, wrote in a social media post. “It's a very bittersweet moment.”
Comtois' body was recovered in 2022. There was evidence that Harris and Mylan's bodies could be found in Prairie Green. The state government announced later last month that police had discovered “potential human bodies in search materials” in the landfill.
In Manitoba's legislature, the progressive conservative interim leader apologised this week for the party's decision not to start a search.
“We lost our way in regards to empathy and we lost our way in terms of what comes to the families of our victims,” said leader Wayne Ewasco.
Cumbria Harris declined to apologize in a social media post.
“If you don't want to prove that your actions aren't, then everything you're saying right now is all that,” she wrote.
