A daughter's fight to bring her murdered mother home

Winnipeg, Canada - The last time Elle Harris saw her mother, she was on a bus in Winnipeg’s North End.

It was a chance encounter. Elle was 16 and making her way to work when she spotted Morgan slouched near the back of the bus.

She was in the grips of drug-induced psychosis - her eyes vacant and unfocused, her body rocking back and forth as her lips moved in silent conversation with someone who wasn’t there.

When their eyes met, there was no flicker of recognition. The woman who had once gently braided her hair and read her bedtime stories now stared through her.

Elle got off at the next stop and sobbed as she watched the bus pull away.

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This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T).

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It was two years later, in early December 2022, when police broke the news: Morgan had been murdered.

Between March and May of that year, a serial killer had systematically targeted vulnerable Indigenous women experiencing homelessness and addiction, luring them to his Winnipeg apartment with offers of food, shelter, or substances before murdering, dismembering, and disposing of them in rubbish bins.

Morgan Harris was his second victim. She was 39 years old.

Jeremy Skibicki’s other victims were 26-year-old Marcedes Myran, 24-year-old Rebecca Contois and 30-year-old Ashlee Shingoose, who was known as Buffalo Woman - a name given to her by Indigenous elders - until she was finally identified this March.

Winnipeg police were first alerted to the then 35-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist on May 16, 2022, when the partial remains of Rebecca Contois were found in a rubbish bin. Skibicki was charged two days later, and the following month, police began searching the Brady Road Landfill, a municipal landfill on the outskirts of the city, where they found more of her remains.

On December 1, 2022, police charged Skibicki with three more counts of murder.

Morgan and Marcedes’s families were told that their relatives' remains were likely in the privately operated Prairie Green Landfill, a sprawling waste disposal site north of Winnipeg.

To their dismay, police refused to search the landfill, believing they had enough evidence to convict Skibicki without the remains of his victims.

"It was like losing her all over again," says Elle of the moment she learned the police wouldn’t search for her mother’s remains. "They called us into a room and just told us - no warning, no asking how we felt about it. They said, 'We're not going to look for your mom,' like she was just garbage to be thrown away."

The provincial government of Manitoba, of which Winnipeg is the capital, declared a search of the Prairie Green landfill "unfeasible", stating that the 10,000 truckloads of waste deposited in the seven months since the women were murdered, combined with the compacting and decomposition that had occurred, made recovery nearly impossible. They estimated the search would cost $184m and said it offered no guarantees of success.

But Elle and the other relatives refused to accept that.

It is a bitterly cold November day. Prayer flags and red dresses flutter against their poles as the harsh prairie winds carry the gentle sound of wind chimes and the scent of sweetgrass, cedar, sage, and woodsmoke. Another smell hangs in the air here: methane from the landfill just a few metres away.

Elle sits on a bench, its worn wooden slats weathered by the brutal Manitoba elements. Camp Morgan, named after her mother, was established in December 2022, when the police and provincial government announced that they would not search for her remains or those of Marcedes Myran in the Prairie Green Landfill.

It began as a grassroots protest encampment - a cluster of tents around a sacred fire just a few steps from the Brady Road Landfill, where Rebecca’s partial remains were found and those of Ashlee Shingoose were thought to be.

The camp has grown since it was established by family members, Indigenous community leaders, and their allies. A wooden shelter now sits at its centre, surrounded by canvas-walled tents heated by small wooden stoves.

Camp Morgan has served several purposes. It is a physical reminder of the injustice these families have endured, a place for ceremonies to honour the murdered women, a base from which to organise protests, and a visual symbol of the community’s refusal to accept that the remains of Indigenous women should be left in a rubbish dump. But for Elle, it is also something else: Camp Morgan, she says, feels like home.

“It’s strange to say I feel safe here, knowing what happened and what’s just over that fence,” she says, gesturing towards the massive landfill. “But there’s something about being with people who understand you without you having to explain."

Her fingers trace the wood grain of the table that serves as the camp’s command centre, where schedules are maintained, media inquiries handled, and the daily business of managing a years-long vigil is managed. It has been worn smooth by countless hands before hers.

“We’re all carrying the same pain,” she continues. “So nobody asks you why you’re quiet one day or crying the next. And we all believe our loved ones deserve better than to be left there. That shared purpose ... creates a kind of strength I don’t feel anywhere else.”

Despite temperatures regularly dropping below -30C (-22F) during the harsh Manitoba winters, volunteers have maintained a 24/7 presence at the site, keeping the sacred fire burning as they kept up the pressure on the authorities to search for their loved ones’ remains. In addition to the camp, they held marches, travelled to Ottawa to testify before parliamentary committees and worked with independent experts to create their own feasibility study that contradicted the government’s assessment.

In October 2023, the political landscape shifted in favour of the families and their supporters when Wab Kinew became the province’s first First Nations premier.

Kinew had marched alongside the families at multiple protests and publicly criticised the previous government’s refusal to search the landfill. He had promised that, if elected, he would authorise just that.

His victory was a historic moment not just for the families of the murdered women but for the nearly 20 percent of Manitobans who identify as Indigenous. Soon after being sworn in, he met the families and apologised for the previous government’s failure to search.

“This is about doing the right thing and sending a message to all Manitobans that you matter and deserve dignity. When someone goes missing, we go looking,” Kinew said at a news conference last June.

“This search is not just about finding remains, it’s about healing historical wounds. We cannot build a just society if we continue to treat some citizens as disposable. Every family deserves closure, and every victim deserves dignity in death as well as in life.”

Kinew’s words helped to lift a weight off the shoulders of Melissa Robinson. She is Morgan’s cousin and has been one of the most vocal community organisers supporting the families as they cycle through hope, despair, and determination.

The weight she’s carried isn’t just emotional - during the harshest part of the winter of 2023, she spent 38 consecutive days at Camp Morgan, sleeping in shifts to make sure the sacred fire never went out and developing pneumonia that she ignored until a fellow volunteer forced her to see a doctor.

Sitting at Camp Morgan, taking deep drags on a cigarette, she shakes her head from side to side as she explains her position: “No, my cousin is not going to lie in a landfill. So that’s why we continued to push. So, we can bring her to peace.”

Elle and Melissa have become a source of strength and comfort to each other, but just a few years ago, neither woman could have imagined the bond they’d form. In fact, before Morgan was murdered, Elle had never even met her mother’s cousin.

Trauma had wrapped itself around the Harris family long before Morgan went missing. Generations before, in the late 1800s, her family had fled starvation on the Long Plain First Nation, eventually making a home on the MacGregor landfill 80 miles (129km) west of Winnipeg - a cruel echo of what would come.

Morgan’s mother endured the residential school system, where Indigenous children were forced to endure brutal - and sometimes deadly - treatment in schools intended to rip them from their families, communities and culture.

The resulting trauma flowed through the family in the form of poverty, alcoholism and addiction.

For the first nine years of her life, Elle was raised by both of her parents. “[He] loved my mom so much,” she says of her non-Indigenous father. But they were both drug addicts, and Elle would watch them inject drugs while she and her siblings were left to fend for themselves.

“I’ve seen everything,” she says, her voice heavy with the weight of childhood memories.

But, despite her addiction, Morgan’s love for her children shone brightly during those early years. Elle smiles as she recalls how her mother taught her to play cards, did crossword puzzles with her, and nurtured her love of reading.

That all changed when Elle was nine, and she, her two sisters, and brother were taken into care. Losing her children broke Morgan's heart, Elle says, and the loss pulled her deeper into her addiction - and onto the streets of Winnipeg.

Elle was placed in the care of her paternal grandparents, while her siblings were sent to foster homes. She says her father’s parents gave her a good life, but were racist towards her mother and kept her from her mother’s side of the family.

“My grandmother made me believe my mother’s family were horrible people,” she says. “She made me believe the people on the streets were horrible people.”

When the police confirmed that Morgan had been murdered, Elle found little sympathy from her grandparents. The experience propelled her back into her mother’s family. But it wasn’t easy for her to reconnect.

Melissa says, “She was very standoffish” in the beginning. “It was clear ... that the trust wasn’t there.”

But, gradually, Elle began to drop her guard and grew closer to Morgan’s family - so close that it was Melissa and her husband who stood by Elle’s side as she received her high school diploma last year. Completing her studies while also attending Skibicki’s trial and dealing with her grief wasn’t easy, but having the support of her maternal relatives helped.

She no longer speaks to her father’s family but says she’s “grateful ... that they fed me and clothed me and kept a roof over my head”.

"I'm very happy for the family I have now," Elle reflects. "They show me it's OK to cry, and I don't have to be so angry all the time."

Doing something constructive to help others has also helped. Alongside Melissa, she now leads Morgan’s Warriors, a volunteer street patrol that helps vulnerable homeless people on the same streets where her mother once lived. Through the patrol, they hope to form connections that could save lives.

In the North End of Winnipeg, the landscape tells its own story.

Dilapidated homes with sagging porches stand behind chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. Discarded needles and broken bottles litter the floors of empty lots. Bullet holes pockmark storefronts where security bars are as common as the windows they cover.

On a frigid November night, the wind pushes fast-food wrappers down cracked sidewalks and bends the bare branches of boulevard trees. The temperature is below freezing, but Melissa moves with practised vigilance, her pink, fluorescent safety vest glowing under streetlights as she leads a small group of volunteers.

She established Morgan's Warriors in the summer of 2024.

The group operates nightly patrols, distributes emergency supplies, maintains a text-alert system for women in danger, and coordinates with existing shelters and services. Members wear distinctive fluorescent vests featuring the silhouette of an Indigenous woman surrounded by flowers.

"If someone had been watching out for Morgan that night, maybe she'd still be here," Melissa reflects. "We can't bring her back, but we can make sure her legacy is that other women don't meet the same fate."

The Warriors maintain a strict nonjudgemental approach, understanding that addiction, mental health struggles, and homelessness are often symptoms of deeper systemic issues and historical trauma. Their work extends to advocating for policy changes, supporting families navigating the child welfare system, and providing cultural reconnection for Indigenous people who have become isolated from their communities.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

On this evening, the group gathers at the corner of Selkirk Avenue and Powers Street, their breath forming clouds in the air as they prepare for the night ahead.

Melissa pulls on a pair of insulated gloves. Around her, more than a dozen volunteers ranging from people in their early 20s to those in their 60s unload supplies from the boots of two vehicles. The group is predominantly Indigenous women, with a few men and non-Indigenous allies among them.

"Make sure to bring your radios and fresh batteries," Melissa calls out. She checks the boxes containing their provisions: two dozen bottles of water, several boxes of granola bars, packages of new socks, hand warmers, and a case containing naloxone kits - essential for responding to the opioid overdoses they frequently encounter.

The corner shop across the street casts a fluorescent glow onto the sidewalk as Melissa directs the volunteers to gather in a circle beside a vacant lot where tall grass has turned brown and brittle with frost. They fall silent, creating a small island of stillness amid the urban background noise - distant sirens, a bus rumbling past, someone shouting two blocks away.

A volunteer lights sage and sweetgrass and, as the smoke rises, moves slowly around the inside of the circle, using her hands to direct the smoke towards each person. The volunteers cup their hands, drawing the smoke to their eyes, ears, mouth, and heart - a ritual repeated nightly before they begin their patrol.

"We are going to be going down this street and along the riverbank. The last time I was there, there was a camp," Melissa explains, as she points towards a narrow, snow-dusted path between two abandoned buildings. From where they stand, the Red River is not visible, but its presence is felt - a dark ribbon winding through the city, its banks a place where the unhoused often seek shelter and where, on occasion, bodies have been found.

"Remember, we are going into their space ... That's their home we are going to be walking into. Be respectful and mindful," she adds firmly.

The group nods in silent agreement.

Melissa's leadership style is uncompromising - a resourcefulness born of necessity in a community where official resources are chronically lacking. When the city told her there was no budget for additional street outreach, she built her own network. When officials claimed certain areas were too dangerous to patrol, she mapped safe routes.

With Elle alongside her, they make a powerful duo. Melissa scans doorways and alleys, while Elle carries extra supplies of thermal blankets. Elle kneels beside an elderly man huddled by a building and offers him soup. Melissa hands out clean socks and sandwiches to a small group standing around a fire. Later, they search for a young woman they've been worried about, asking people behind a skip if they've seen her.

"They're people just like us," Elle says of the homeless people they help. "They're people like my mom, people like my dad."

"You can't go out there and get angry at them for something they couldn't control," she says of the addictions many battle. "They were born into it."

It was here on these same streets that Skibicki hunted Indigenous women in 2022, operating for months without detection. The murders sent shockwaves through Canada and beyond, laying bare the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), a tragedy that has been unfolding in plain sight for decades.

In a corner booth of a restaurant close to the Winnipeg airport, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse leans forward, her hands clasped tightly. Emotion flashes across her face as she speaks of the four murdered women and the thousands of other Indigenous women lost to the MMIWG crisis.

"Every time I see another grandmother, another mother having to search for their daughter, I feel sick," she says. Referring to Canada’s years-long National Inquiry into MMIWG and the resulting 1,200-page report released in 2019, Woodhouse explains: "We've had the Inquiry, we've had the recommendations, we've done the marches. And still, our women disappear.”

The crisis crosses the border between Canada and the United States, she explains, just as Indigenous peoples historically moved freely across these lands. The root causes are the same on each side: the destructive legacy of residential schools, systematic displacement from traditional lands, racist police responses and hypersexualised stereotypes of Indigenous women. Whether in British Columbia or Washington state, Alberta or Montana, the patterns of violence and institutional failure remain disturbingly consistent.

The same barriers to justice exist - cases that aren't properly investigated, families who aren't taken seriously by law enforcement, and data that goes uncollected. Many of the missing connect directly across the border - women who disappeared along highways that stretch from Canada into the US and trafficking routes that exploit the jurisdictional gaps.

Woodhouse believes that just as both countries share the same historical wounds, the solutions must also cross borders.

“First and foremost, those borders aren’t our borders,” she says. “We never created them. We have Anishinaabe people and Cree people, and Haudenosaunee on both sides. Those borders were made by governments very recently, and First Peoples were here in these lands ... since the beginning of time, since God created this Earth. So we have to look at this crisis as a whole.”

The chief’s eyes fill with tears, but her voice remains steady as she says: "Donna shouldn't have to wait outside a landfill hoping to find pieces of her granddaughter. No kokum [grandmother] should.”

Donna Bartlett sits at a wooden kitchen table, her slight frame perched on the edge of her chair. With its warm lighting and walls adorned with artwork by Indigenous artists, Candace House, a one-of-a-kind support centre for families affected by violent crime in downtown Winnipeg, feels a long way from the cold, sterile court two blocks away.

The 67-year-old spent countless hours here during Skibicki’s six-week trial last summer. During those gruelling weeks, the families of the murdered women would gather around this table, sometimes sitting in stunned silence; at other times sharing stories about their loved ones over cups of tea.

“We would come back from court and just ... collapse,” Donna says, looking around the kitchen as if seeing the ghosts of those difficult days. “None of us could have made it through without this place. Some days we couldn’t even talk about what we’d heard. Other days we couldn’t stop talking.”

Donna is Marcedes Myran’s grandmother. She is talking on what would have been Marcedes’s 29th birthday. The staff at Candace House have bought a chocolate cake - Marcedes’s favourite. “She loved chocolate everything,” Donna explains, her hand resting protectively on the white cake box. She’ll take the cake home to Marcedes’s children.

In the quiet of Candace House, Donna remembers her granddaughter as mischievous and full of life, always playing pranks on her kokum.

“She loved to hide my shoes,” she recalls with a soft laugh. "I'd be getting ready to leave ... and suddenly my shoes would be gone ... She'd say, 'But Kokum, you can't leave without your shoes!' Then she'd giggle so hard she'd give herself away.

“And she was always hiding behind doors or furniture to jump out and scare me. Even when I knew she was going to do it ... I'd still jump and scream, and she'd laugh that big laugh of hers."

But there was something the young Marcedes enjoyed even more than playing pranks on her grandmother. From the age of 12, she harboured a deep love for poetry, inspired by a teacher who introduced her to the work of the Mi'kmaq poet Rita Joe.

"The day she came home with that poetry book, something just clicked for her," Donna says. "She started writing about everything - the seasons, her feelings, our family history."

Marcedes would fill notebooks with verses about her dreams for the future, her observations of nature, and later, as a teenager, the challenges of being Indigenous in a world that often misunderstood her.

Donna would find scraps of paper with her poems scattered around the house, tucked under cushions, folded into books. "She wrote like she couldn't get the words out fast enough," she reflects.

Now Donna cherishes those poems, taking them out to read and wondering what the future would have held for her granddaughter had Skibicki not taken it away.

"She believed in people. She would trust them, helping them and talking to people, you know? That's what got her in trouble. Her trusting nature," Donna says as she shakes her head.

When Marcedes and her three siblings were very young, Donna took them in. Donna’s oldest daughter was struggling with addiction and knew her mother would take good care of her children. Their mother would visit when she could - sometimes staying for weeks when she was doing well, but disappearing for months during relapses.

"I raised them the best I could," Donna says, her voice dropping to a near whisper. "Worked two jobs sometimes.”

But as a young mother herself, Marcedes faced the devastating loss of her two children to the child welfare system. The children were initially taken during a wellness check when the authorities found inadequate food in their apartment. What was intended as a temporary measure became permanent as Marcedes struggled to meet the requirements for reunification while battling housing instability.

"Losing those babies broke something in her," Donna says. "She'd been such a good mother - reading to them every night, making sure they had what they needed."

Marcedes turned to substances to numb the grief she felt at being separated from her children. For two years, she cycled between periods of determination to regain custody and devastating relapses.

Then she was offered a bed at a live-in treatment facility. Donna remembers her granddaughter's excitement when she called to share the news. "She said, 'Kokum, this is it. I'm going to get clean, get my babies back, make you proud.'"

It was the last conversation they had.

On December 1, 2022, Donna got a call from the Winnipeg police. After months of searching and waiting for news about Marcedes, they had an update and asked Donna to gather the family at her home. It was the worst day of Donna’s life.

“That day changed us all,” she says.

“They [the police] told us everything, that she was murdered and where she was. They told us they had the perpetrator in jail and they weren’t going to dig the landfill because they had enough evidence to convict him. We were just like, why?”

The days melted into each other after that, Donna says. The sun rose and set without meaning. She would find half-drunk cups of tea she had no recollection of making, and find herself standing in rooms with no memory of walking into them. But she had to pull herself together for her great-grandchildren.

“My sisters came over and we talked about doing a funeral for her, even though we didn’t have her body. So, we had a memorial here for her friends and street friends. And then we had a funeral at Long Plain,” she says.

Elle believes she could have easily ended up on the same path as her mother. “My whole family is filled with addictions and mental illnesses. But I chose to take a step away from that,” she reflects.

Morgan’s Warriors helps with that.

“I don’t see myself doing anything else. I don’t want to work at a grocery store. I don’t want to work in a restaurant. I don’t want to work in an office sitting down 24/7. I’d rather be out here. Because if no one else is going to help them, then who will? Definitely not the cops, not the government. So we have to. No one’s going to look after our people more so than us, right?”

But the challenge is huge. Winnipeg has one of Canada's highest rates of homelessness, with some 1,250 people experiencing homelessness on any given night in a city of 750,000. Indigenous people, who make up about 12 percent of Winnipeg's total population, represent more than 70 percent of the city's homeless population.

The statistics paint a grim picture: an Indigenous person in Winnipeg is at least 15 times more likely to experience homelessness than a non-Indigenous resident, their period of homelessness is likely to be significantly longer, and they are more likely to experience multiple episodes of homelessness throughout their lifetime.

These aren't just numbers to Melissa and Elle - they're the reality they confront every night.

"My mom used to hang out right there," Elle says softly, nodding towards N'Dinawemak - Our Relatives' Place. It's a space for the unhoused, with showers, food and sleeping quarters.

As they continue their patrol, Elle shares memories of her mother. "Mom was always making people laugh," she says. "Even during the hardest times. She had this way of finding humour in everything." Her voice softens. "When I was little, before things got really bad, she used to sing to me every night before bed - these old lullabies."

Melissa notes the transformation in Elle over the past two years - from a grief-stricken daughter to a powerful advocate who now teaches vulnerable women the safety strategies that might have protected her own mother.

“Every woman deserves protection. Because my mother mattered. And because the system didn't protect her, so now we have to protect each other,” Elle reflects.

“I don't want people, when they hear her [Morgan’s] name, to think of what she had to endure,” says Melissa. “I want people to remember that her family took their grief and turned it into action.”

In late February, the search crews at the Prairie Green Landfill discovered human remains. They were later identified as Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran.