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.
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.
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.
But Elle and the other relatives refused to accept that.
