The police in Manitoba have identified some of the human remains found in the search of a landfill near Winnipeg last month as those of Morgan Beatrice Harris, one of four Indigenous victims of a serial killer, the authorities said on Friday.
Ms. Harris and three other women, who were all from the Winnipeg area, were killed between March and May 2022. Ms. Harris, a member of the Long Plain First Nation, was 39.
Until Friday, only the remains of one woman, Rebecca Contois, 24, had been found and identified.
Jeremy Anthony Michael Skibicki was convicted in the killings late last year and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. He had expressed support for the far right on social media, filling his Facebook page with white supremacist, misogynistic and antisemitic comments.
The other two victims were Marcedes Myran, 26, and an unidentified woman whom First Nations elders call Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman.
The issue of whether to search the Prairie Green Landfill near Winnipeg for the remains became a political issue during the 2023 provincial elections. The Progressive Conservatives, who were defeated, ran campaign ads and put up billboards opposing a search, citing its cost, the risks to investigators and what the party contended were slim chances of finding anything.
Indigenous groups pointed out the contrast with the case of Robert Pickton, a serial killer in British Columbia, who had preyed on women, mostly Indigenous, in an impoverished Vancouver neighborhood.
In 2002, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turned his pig farm near Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, into the site of Canada’s largest crime scene investigation. Mr. Pickton was eventually convicted of killing six women, although he boasted of killing dozens more.
The identification of Ms. Harris’s remains was announced in a statement Friday by the New Democratic Party government, which had promised during the campaign to search the landfill. The party’s leader is Wab Kinew, the first Indigenous person to serve as a provincial premier.
“Please keep our families in your hearts tonight and every day going forward as we trust this process,” Ms. Harris’s daughter, Cabria, wrote in a social media post. “It is a very bittersweet moment.”
Ms. Contois’s remains were recovered in 2022. Evidence had suggested that the remains of Ms. Harris and Ms. Myran could be at Prairie Green. The provincial government announced late last month that the police had found “potential human remains in the search material” at the landfill.
In Manitoba’s legislature, the Progressive Conservatives’ interim leader apologized this week for the party’s decision to not launch a search.
“We lost our way in regards to empathy and also lost our way in regards to closure being brought forward to the families of the victims,” the leader, Wayne Ewasko, said.
Cambria Harris, in a social media post, rejected the apology.
“Unless your actions want to prove me otherwise, anything you are saying right now is mere words,” she wrote.
