A Winnipeg superior court judge will decide next month whether a man who has admitted to killing four First Nations women is criminally responsible of first-degree murder after closing arguments in his six-week-long trial were heard on Monday.
The verdict for Jeremy Skibicki is scheduled to be delivered on July 11, Manitoba Court of King’s Bench Justice Glenn Joyal told a packed room filled with the women’s families, friends and relatives. The large group of supporters followed the proceeding with a traditional Indigenous round dance at the downtown intersection outside the Law Courts building, as drums echoed and a handful of vehicle lanes were briefly brought to a halt.
Surrounded by three sheriff’s officers, his ankles shackled, Mr. Skibicki, 37, left the courtroom showing no emotion and without making eye contact with observers. His lawyers from Legal Aid Manitoba, who have argued he was suffering from schizophrenia that made him incapable of murder, walked behind him.
“The fact that these Indigenous women were killed in this fashion is quite impactful,” defence lawyer Leonard Tailleur said in an interview after the hearing. “But we have an entirely sick human being who did this. That’s what we’ve been trying to say from the beginning.”
Closing arguments have been made in the trial of Jeremy Skibicki on June 10, a Winnipeg man who had admitted to killing four Indigenous women. His lawyers say he should be found not criminally responsible due to mental illness. The family says the judge needs to do the right thing and convict him. The judge has reserved his decision until July 11.
The Canadian Press
The Crown, however, continued to insist on Monday that Mr. Skibicki preyed on his victims in a calculated manner, and that he did not suffer from – nor has he ever been diagnosed with – any form of schizophrenia.
The prosecutors told Justice Joyal that Mr. Skibicki stalked the women at shelters for vulnerable people, inviting them back to his home to drug them, sexually assault them, then kill them before engaging in further sexual acts on their bodies, only to dump their dismembered remains in garbage bins, such that they ultimately ended up in Winnipeg-area landfills.
Earlier in the trial, both the defence and the Crown had agreed that Mr. Skibicki killed four women in 2022: A yet-to-be-identified woman whom Indigenous elders have named Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, meaning Buffalo Woman, on or about March 15; 39-year-old Morgan Harris on or about May 1 of that year; 26-year-old Marcedes Myran on or about May 4; and 24-year-old Rebecca Contois on or about May 15.
But the Crown and defence have provided the court with two starkly different opinions from forensic psychiatrists: The defence expert has said that Mr. Skibicki was suffering from schizophrenic delusions, which compelled him to kill the women; while the Crown-ordered assessment showed that he killed them because of his homicidal necrophilia, the desire to have sex with dead people, and was malingering about his self-reported schizophrenia.
Justice Joyal must now determine the state of Mr. Skibicki’s mental capacity. Should the judge find that he is not criminally responsible for the crimes, it would not automatically constitute an acquittal. Such a verdict would lead to a court-ordered treatment in a mental-health facility as part of the sentencing instead of an imprisonment.
Summarizing the graphic evidence presented in court last month, including the video of Mr. Skibicki’s confession to police and testimony from more than a dozen witnesses, prosecutor Christian Vanderhooft wrapped up his arguments by addressing a question that the accused himself had looked up online after he killed three of the women.
“To answer Mr. Skibicki’s own question, when he did a Google search on May 5, 2022, 5:15 a.m., less than 12 hours after he was seen walking toward his apartment with Ms. Myran: What is the definition of a serial killer?” Mr. Vanderhooft said Monday.
“The answer, Mr. Skibicki, is you.”
Later on Monday, Grand Chief Cathy Merrick of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs renewed calls to the federal and provincial governments to search the Prairie Green Landfill, a garbage dump north of Winnipeg, where police believe at least two of the women’s remains – that of Ms. Harris and Ms. Myran – are located.
Winnipeg police had found some of Ms. Contois’s remains at the separate Brady Road landfill in the southern outskirts of the city in 2022. But they have not yet found the bodies of the other three women that Mr. Skibicki killed that year.
“A garbage dump is not a gravesite. Our women do not belong there,” Ms. Merrick, who represents 62 of the 63 First Nations in Manitoba, said in an interview. “We need to search the landfill for them now.”
At the protest outside the courthouse, the women’s families said they have not yet heard from Premier Wab Kinew about any plans to begin the Prairie Green search since the Manitoba and federal governments each committed $20-million in March for the effort.
“We’re demanding now that a date be given to us,” said Ms. Myran’s sister Jorden Myran, adding that the women’s relatives have set up a meeting with the Premier this week.
“My mom needs to be brought back home,” said Ms. Harris’s daughter Cambria Harris. “I am ready to go through this same process over and over again until all of our women are brought back home, until they have gotten dignified funerals. We will not be treated like we are not human anymore, no matter how many protests it takes, no matter how many courtrooms we have to be in.”
Temur Durrani