Hunt for Mackenzie Trottier could draw on lessons from earlier landfill searches

The search for Mackenzie Lee Trottier is going to narrow dramatically on Wednesday when the Saskatoon police shift their focus to a section at the city landfill about the size of an NHL hockey rink.

Trottier's parents last saw their 22-year-old daughter four days before Christmas 2020 in Saskatoon when she left the house and hopped in a ride-hailing vehicle

Since she was reported missing, the search has extended across the country.

But police said in a news conference earlier this month that this focus changed in late 2023 "when a substantial amount of data was collected which identified a specific area of the landfill."

"Over the course of the investigation there were several devices that were seized, and extraction of information from those devices has led us to the point where we are confident in the location that we're searching," deputy chief Cameron McBride said.

Why police are confident about the location, and exactly how they'll do the search, could be laid out in detail in Episode 4 of the Deals, Debts and Death podcast created by senior members of the police communications team.

The podcast, released in December 2023, outlines the search for another missing woman, Kandice Singbeil, a 32-year-old mother who vanished in 2015 from downtown Saskatoon.

At one point, police believed she may have been killed and her body placed in a downtown dumpster, eventually ending up in a private landfill outside the city.

It proved not to be the case, but the episode detailed how police approach the daunting task of sifting through debris at the sprawling landfill.

The landfill search for Singbeil benefitted from a decision by the city back in May 2014.

It announced an ambitious plan to spend $1.2 million to put barcodes on 66,000 black garbage bins. Each barcode linked the cart to an address.

The project also included equipping garbage trucks with real-time GPS and cameras.

This meant the city could determine exactly when and where garbage was picked up, and where it ended up at the landfill.

In the podcast, Det. Sgt. Tyson Lavallee described how police came across a concerning piece of video a week into the 2015 Singbeil investigation. At the time, they were focusing on videos from cameras in an area near a downtown apartment building.