Daughter of alleged serial killer's victim wants search of landfill because 'my mother deserves to come home'
CBC
WARNING: This story contains distressing details.
Cambria Harris's voice was heavy with sorrow as she spoke about her mother at a vigil on Thursday evening, hours after the missing woman was identified as the victim of an alleged serial killer in Winnipeg.
"I want her to be remembered as happy-go-lucky as she was. She was silly, she was fun. People loved to be around her," said Harris, 21.
"When we were searching for her, there wasn't a single person that did not know who she was — and no one had a bad thing to say."
Morgan Harris, 39, was one of four women who police allege was killed by Jeremy Skibicki between March and May of this year, though police have only found the remains of one. Skibicki, 35, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder.
The vigil was held outside a residence in North Kildonan where Harris said police told her they found evidence that connected Skibicki to her mother and one of the other victims, 26-year-old Marcedes Myran.
She said she finds some closure in knowing what happened to her mother after months of looking for her. But at the same time, she doesn't have much — because police haven't found her body.
The partial remains of another of Skibicki's alleged victims, 24-year-old Rebecca Contois, were discovered at Winnipeg's Brady Road landfill in June after an extensive search prompted by the discovery of remains a month earlier in a North Kildonan back lane garbage bin.
At the news conference Thursday where police announced the other victims — which included an Indigenous woman in her 20s who police haven't been able to identify — Winnipeg Police Service Chief Danny Smyth said he doesn't "foresee an additional search of the landfill" for the other remains.
Harris — who's hoping for closure, along with her four siblings and daughter — said she's frustrated by that news.
"To not search it is not going to do anything. I think that's disgusting," she said.
"My mother deserves to come home. We deserve to have her remains, and so do the other families."
Nahanni Fontaine, house leader for Manitoba's Opposition NDP, said it was devastating to see the heartbreak in Harris's family as she sat with them on Thursday morning.
She was emotional as she spoke at the Manitoba legislature following question period, pausing often to collect herself.
The Rachel Notley government's consumer carbon tax wound up becoming a weapon the UCP wielded to drum the Alberta NDP out of office. But that levy-and-repayment program, and the wide-ranging "climate leadership plan" around it, also stood as the NDP's boldest, provincial-reputation-altering move in their single-term tenure.