‘Heartless, evil monster’ gets life

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This article was published 29/08/2024 (445 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG — A packed courtroom erupted in cheers, applause and at least one shout of “rot in hell!” Wednesday as convicted serial killer Jeremy Skibicki was led away by sheriff’s officers after a judge sentenced him to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

The cathartic outburst capped an emotional Court of King’s Bench hearing during which family members and supporters of the four Indigenous women Skibicki killed addressed him for the first time.

Skibicki was convicted on July 11 for the killings of Rebecca Contois, 24, Marcedes Myran, 26, Morgan Harris, 39, and an unidentified woman eventually given the name Mashkode Bizhiki’kwe, or Buffalo Woman.

Skibicki sexually defiled his victims’s corpses before disposing of them in garbage bins. Skibicki dismembered two of his victims.

“You are a heartless, evil monster, and what you did to my niece is unforgivable,” Contois’ aunt Valerie Moar said.

“I feel sick every time I hear your name. … For this, you made yourself famous. I hope you are ready for your life behind bars because you will never have a chance to hurt another Indigenous woman.”

Cambria Harris, Morgan Harris’s daughter, looked straight at Skibicki as she called him a “vile coward.”

“Every moment he spends in this courtroom breathing, free, even in shackles, is another moment my mother is not,” she said. “While he gets to stay there, surrounded and protected, my mother continues to lay in a landfill, the very place he put her. Where he discarded her and treated her like garbage.”

Skibicki, flanked by two sheriff’s officers, sat stone-faced in a portable prisoner’s box, as he did for every day of his nearly four-week trial. More than 150 people, including family, community members, police officers and reporters filled every available seat in the courtroom, including two jury boxes.

Skibicki didn’t make eye contact with any of the 14 people who provided victim impact statements to court. When Justice Glenn Joyal asked him at the conclusion of the hearing if he had anything to say, Skibicki responded with a casual “no.”

Joyal praised family members for their bravery and “powerful and moving” victim impact statements.

“There is no question the pain being expressed is unfathomable and multi-faceted,” he said. “This case has thrust family members into the spotlight, not of their choosing.”

“That this hearing is taking place in the shadow of the 10th anniversary of Tina Fontaine’s death cannot be lost on anyone in this courtroom. It is clear from many of the impact statements, the already identified safety and security concerns felt by vulnerable Indigenous women and girls remain acute.”

Skibicki received life sentences for each killing, which will be served concurrent to each other. In a 2022 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled consecutive life sentences to be unconstitutional.

“Make no mistake, Mr. Skibicki, because of the current state of the law, the only available sentence I can impose today will, regrettably, not adequately reflect the gravity of these offences and your moral culpability,” Joyal said. “I hope that any eventual parole panel will take very careful note of the evidence in this case, my reasons for decision, the voices we heard today and my comments now in imposing sentence.”

Both Cambria Harris and Donna Bartlett, Myran’s grandmother, ended their victim impact statements with a loud “F— YOU” directed at Skibicki, each time arousing cheers and applause from the court gallery.

Bartlett described her granddaughter as a kind, trusting woman who loved her family and playing practical jokes. Her murder has left family members with an emptiness that will never heal, she said.

“Having to sit in the courtroom with this evil monster, having to listen to all the excuses, listening to what that monster has done to my girl hurts,” she said. “It cuts my heart deep. I can see my girl fighting for her life. That will never leave my soul and mind.”

Bartlett opened her victim impact statement with a focus on Buffalo Woman.

“She was a person, she had family who loved her,” she said. “You had no right to take her life. I’m sure her family is still looking for her. I pray they find out who she is soon.”

Skibicki targeted all four victims after meeting them at downtown shelters in early 2022.

He was arrested on May 17 of that year after a man looking for scrap metal found Contois’ head in a garbage bin near the killer’s North Kildonan apartment days earlier.

Skibicki was charged with three more counts of first-degree murder that December.

Stephanie Contois, Rebecca’s sister, said she lives in constant fear since the killing.

“I can’t look at a garbage bin or even a truck without having that really bad thought in my head,” she wrote in a statement read by her brother, Jesse Contois.

“It makes me sick to my stomach to have to live my life worried about what kind of monsters live out there. … It makes me worried about being Indigenous, and I worry about my loved ones every day. Nobody should have to live their lives like the way we do.”

Skibicki admitted killing the women, but his lawyer, Leonard Tailleur, argued his client was not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder — specifically, schizophrenia. Skibicki claimed he had heard voices and believed he was on a mission from God.

Crown attorneys Chris Vanderhooft and Renee Lagimodiere had argued Skibicki was driven to kill the women because of his perverse desire to have sex with people he had killed, as well as his white supremacist beliefs and an urge for power and control.

Joyal rejected the defence and last month found him guilty on all four counts, saying the Crown had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Skibicki understood the killings were legally and morally wrong.

About a month after Contois’s remains were discovered, investigators learned Harris and Myran’s remains were likely at Prairie Green Landfill north of Winnipeg. Police decided not to search the site, concluding it would be too dangerous and difficult.

After last fall’s provincial election, the NDP government provided $20 million for the search, as did the federal government. The excavation and manual search is expected to begin this fall.

Grand Chief Cathy Merrick of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs told court Skibicki’s murders have left deep scars and will be felt for generations, and that the case has underscored the need for justice and accountability.

During his lengthy police statement, Skibicki said one thing the Crown can agree with, Vanderhooft said in an opening address to the court Wednesday.

“What happens to me will never be enough,” Skibicki told investigators.

“He is the personification of indignity and deserves every second that he will be incarcerated,” Vanderhooft said. “His moral culpability for each murder couldn’t be higher.”

» Winnipeg Free Press